Update: In preparation for this weekend's final count, Elections BC releases riding-specific numbers

My blog post earlier this week on whether it was likely B.C.'s election results could change after the final count got a fair bit of traction on Twitter and I did interviews about it this week with CKNW, Global TV and The Globe and Mail.

The analysis I did in that blog post was was based on a rough estimate that there were only about 500-700 votes left to count in each riding. This was based on Election BC's estimate of total uncounted votes (originally 49,000, then updated to 65,000).

But of course, some ridings were always going to have more uncounted votes than others — and if one of the closest ridings had a lot more uncounted votes than average, that would increase the chances of an upset.

Late Friday afternoon, Elections BC released data on how many uncounted votes there are estimated to be in each riding. And... it doesn't change things that much. That's because while there are some ridings that have a lot more uncounted votes than others, the closest ridings are all pretty close to the average of 700 votes, if not lower.

I've made a Google Spreadsheet detailing what's going on in the closest ridings. But here are the basics:

As you can see from the estimates in the final column, for the NDP to pick up any of those three Conservative seats, they'd have to win the uncounted votes by a hefty margin of at least 16 points. In Surrey-Guildford, that would be the equivalent of the NDP winning all the uncounted votes by a margin of 55% to 39%, in a riding where on election night both parties basically got 47%.  Not impossible, but pretty darn unlikely.

The 3.5% gap the Conservatives would need to snatch Juan de Fuca - Malahat is a lot less. But that would mean bucking a two decade trend in which the NDP did better in the late-counted votes and the right-of-centre party did worse. (Some folks have told me on Twitter there actually is some polling data suggesting mail-in voters might be more Conservative this time around, but I haven't had any luck tracking down an original source document for that.)

One other interesting thing, which I mentioned on Twitter but forgot to include in my last blog post: One of the really big unknowns about the final count this time is how procrastinators vote. In past elections, all mail-in ballots were held until the final count. But this time, any mail-in ballots that came in before the last day of advance voting were counted ahead of time and included in the election-night count. So the mail-in ballots left to count are, by definition, from those people who left voting until the last few days — either because they didn't get around to it, or they were undecided. It's not hard to imagine that those types of voters could be different than those mail-in voters who got their votes in early. 

If folks are curious, the riding with the most uncounted votes was Victoria-Beacon Hill (where Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau lost) where there are 1,869 votes remaining to be counted. There are the least uncounted votes in North Coast-Haida Gwaii (just 183).

I've exported the data from Elections BC's PDF to a tab on the Google Spreadsheet if anyone wants to take a closer look at the data.

Depending on what else I get up to on the weekend, I may update the Google Spreadsheet to pull in live recount data for the closest ridings, as I did back in 2017. But no promises.

UPDATE, 9pm: Since Juan de Fuca - Malahat (JFM) is the closest riding by far, people are understandably curious about how the late counted ballots compared to election-night votes in that specific riding in past elections. That's tricky, because Juan de Fuca - Malahat is a new riding for 2024, but we can look at the three ridings that each had part of their boundaries used to create JFM.

If we look at all ballots counted late, the NDP increased their share in all ridings except Langford - Juan de Fuca in 2017, and the Liberal vote share went down each time.

(Click on a chart to see it bigger.)

Things look a bit worse for the NDP if you just look at the mail-in ballots (which is the majority of the late-counted votes this time):

If you're a Conservative supporter, you might take comfort from the fact that in 2017, the Liberal share of the vote went up in all three ridings and the NDP went down in two of the three.

But I think it's important to look at the actual number of mail-in ballots in 2017. In Langford-Juan de Fuca the NDP got 53 and the Liberals got 30. In Cowichan Valley, the NDP got 28 votes and the Liberals got 29. These are very small numbers. Even a handful more votes for the NDP would have produced very different vote shares. If the NDP got just 6 (6!) more mail-in votes in Cowichan Valley in 2017, their vote share would have gone up compared to their election-night results. When you get down to the riding level results, there just isn't much the data can tell us. There were too many mail-in ballots in 2020 and too few in 2017 to say anything meaningful about what might happen this time.

P.S. The news sites I've been tracking seem to be a bit wobbly on whether the lead for the NDP in Juan de Fuca - Malahat is 20 votes or 23 votes. And some other results seem to change by one or two votes either way, sometimes on the same site. For all the ridings, including Juan de Fuca-Malahat, the number I'm using are what Election BC's preliminary results page said at the time I pressed publish on this blog post. For Juan de Fuca-Malahat, that's 23 votes.