Transit-tax vote count chugs along
The result of the highly anticipated transit plebiscite is still on track for an expected late June announcement.
“It’s all coming together,” said Jordan Bateman, spokesman with the No TransLink Tax campaign and director with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
On Tuesday morning, Bateman toured two Elections B.C. counting facilities in Victoria to observe the plebiscite ballot count and said he expects a result by late June.
“This was essentially six months of hard campaigning and voting,” Bateman said, noting all that’s left to do is wait for the count to wrap up.
“Now it’s just grinding through all these darn envelopes. That takes a lot of time and it’s not like a provincial election where you have thousands of volunteers and paid staff working on election night counts.”
Each ballot has to be hand removed from its two envelopes before being fed through a ScanTron-style machine, the same type that marks provincial high school exams.
Bateman said Elections B.C. staff are working to keep the ballots of various municipalities together, so that municipality-by-municipality data can be provided.
“The only disappointment I felt today — and this isn’t Elections B.C.’s fault — but I did see hundreds of ballots that won’t be counted because they came in after the deadline,” Bateman said.
The transit plebiscite looked to the region’s registered voters to determine whether a 0.5 per cent sales tax should be enacted in order to fund the Mayors’ Council’s Transportation and Transit Plan. The plan would include improvements such as additional bus service, a new B-Line, increased SkyTrains and West Coast Express, a new Pattullo Bridge and rapid transit.