Update: Elections BC has revised the results for Coquitlam-Burke Mountain citing a “transposition error”. The projects have been updated to reflect this change.

Here’s my attempt to project absentee vote projections for the cliffhanger ridings from last night.

Data

BC Election final results 2013

BC Election preliminary results 2017

Method

First, I calculated the absentee vote as a percentage of preliminary (non-absentee) votes.

Coquitlam-Burke Mountain – 2013 Douglas Horne Chris Wilson LIB NDP Prelim subtotal 8,868 6,420 s. 98 Special 24 36 s. 99 Absentee – in ED 482 439 s. 100 Absentee – out of ED 176 209 s. 101 Absentee – advance 41 53 s. 104 Voting in DEO office 149 143 s. 106 Voting by mail 26 15 Absentee subtotal 898 895 absentee as % of prelim 10.13% 13.94%

I then used that as a proxy to calculate the absentee ballots for 2017, and thus obtain the projected grand total.

Prelim 2017 Absentee as % of prelim 2013 Projected Total 2017 Electoral District LIB NDP LIB NDP LIB NDP Coquitlam-Burke Mountain 9,514 9,344 10.13% 13.94% 10,551 10,611 Courtenay-Comox* 10,049 10,058 11.16% 13.21% 11,171 11,386 Maple Ridge-Mission 9,723 9,843 9.77% 9.95% 10,673 10,822



According to my projections, Coquitlam-Burke Mountain will flip from Liberal to NDP, and NDP will hold onto Courtenay-Comox and Maple Ridge-Mission with increased margins.

This will make it a 42-42 tie, with Andrew Weaver’s Green’s emerging as the ultimate kingmaker.

Courtenay-Comox is a new riding, but it is not too different to Comox Valley, so I used number for Comox Valley to project the outcome for Courtenay-Comox. Another factor to note here is that the BC Liberal Jim Benninger used to be the base commander of CFB Comox. As a result, this is the riding I’m least confident about in projecting.

I didn’t try to forecast the outcome for Richmond-Queensborough absentee count because it is a brand new riding.

[Photo Credit: Dane Low]