Black on BC’s pandemic election

Assoc. Prof. David Black spoke to CHEK News about the race on Vancouver Island, and the Victoria Times Colonist about the possible consequences of a surge of mail-in voting in BC.

Here’s an excerpt from the Times Colonist:  

David Black, an associate professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University, said more concerning for him than the issue of fraud, is the challenge facing election scrutineers who will have to verify hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots which are sure to have imperfections and inconsistencies.

“People just don’t have experience voting like this before,” Black said. “A certain amount of forgiveness is going to be necessary.”

By before noon on Thursday, approximately 717,000 registered voters had requested vote-by-mail packages, Elections B.C. said, more than 100 times the 6,517 people who voted by mail in the 2017 election. So far, 177,000 of those mail-in ballots have been returned to the elections agency.

Black has previously served as an election scrutineer and said there’s a representative for each party eye-balling every ballot to confirm the voter’s selection was their true intention.

“It’s one of the main disruptions we’re experiencing when trying to do politics in a pandemic,” he said. “How do we deal with mail-in ballots at this scale?”

Catch more of Black’s analysis in the Times Colonist and on CHEK News.