British Columbians vote on Saturday, October 24, in a snap provincial election Premier David Eby called on September 22, and most ballots cast on voting day will be counted by hand. Elections BC says the snap call’s timeline and logistics mean voters at their assigned voting places will be checked in on paper and tallied manually after polls close.
Why most votes will be counted by hand
Elections BC is running the province’s 44th general election under what it calls its snap election model, a scaled-back way of delivering voting services inside the short timelines of an unscheduled election.
Under that model, the difference falls on voting day itself. A voter at their assigned voting place on Saturday will be checked in using a paper voting book, not an electronic one, and officials will count that voter’s paper ballot by hand once voting closes at 8 p.m. Pacific time. Anyone voting outside their assigned place follows absentee procedures, and those ballots wait for the final count.
Elections BC says it went back to a manual count because of “the short time frame and complex operational logistics of a snap election.” It is a logistics decision, the agency stresses, not a judgement on the machines.
How B.C. counted last time, and what has not changed
The hand count is a return to an older routine. In 2024, electronic tabulators counted voter-marked paper ballots in a B.C. general election for the first time, an approach Elections BC’s own report considered a success: tabulation let officials report the first preliminary results within about five minutes of polls closing.
Most other ways of voting look the same as in 2024. Advance voting, which ran from October 16 to 21, district electoral office voting, special voting and vote-by-mail all continue to use electronic voting books and tabulators, and Elections BC expects those results to be reported first on election night.
What Saturday night’s count will not include is absentee and mail-in ballots. Those are added at the final count, November 6 to 10, with the writs returned November 18 — so the tightest ridings may not be settled until that count is done.
A snap call, two years early
None of this was on the calendar a month ago. B.C.’s fixed election date would have put the next vote in October 2028. Eby instead dissolved the legislature on September 22, framing the campaign around the trade dispute with the United States and the need for a fresh mandate to face it.
The call came two days after Kerry-Lynne Findlay resigned as Conservative leader, following months of caucus departures. The Conservatives go into voting day under an interim leader, Lorne Doerkson, the MLA for Cariboo-Chilcotin. All 93 seats are in play, and a party needs 47 for a majority. The NDP held 47 seats at dissolution, the Conservatives 28, CentreBC eight, and the Greens and OneBC two each.
The snap call also landed the provincial vote one week after B.C.’s municipal elections on October 17, an overlap local leaders had asked Eby to avoid — a second election, with a different ballot and different rules, in eight days.
Where the campaign stands on its final day
The leaders spent Friday, the last full day of campaigning, making their closing cases. Eby accused Doerkson of being a “Trojan horse” for Conservative extremists, while the Conservatives argued the early call was opportunistic and that a decade of NDP government had left affordability and health care no better.
The last published polling points to a Conservative edge, not a runaway. A Research Co. survey of 802 likely voters, conducted October 21 to 23 and released Friday, put the Conservatives at 44 per cent among decided voters, the governing NDP at 40 per cent and the Greens, led by Emily Lowan, at 10 per cent. Eby and Doerkson were tied, at 34 per cent each, as best premier.
The same poll ranked the economy and jobs as the province’s most important issue, named by 28 per cent of likely voters, followed by housing, poverty and homelessness at 23 per cent and health care at 20 per cent — the priorities that ran through the leaders’ debates on October 13 and 14, and a race fought hard in Surrey and the Fraser Valley, where the Conservatives poll strongest, against NDP strength on Vancouver Island.
More than 891,000 advance and other early ballots were cast from Friday to Wednesday, about 24 per cent of registered voters — but down more than 11 per cent from 2024, when early voting passed one million and set records. Saturday’s hand count will show whether those voters simply waited for voting day, and how long the province waits, ballot by ballot, to learn who governs it.
