B.C. election truthers are a bad sign for democracy

With just a week to go until the United States election and the polls somehow deadlocked between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Canadians are left to wait and wonder. Will we be plunged back into the blender of chaos and calamity that coloured the first four years under Trump? Or will we get the conspiracy theories and rioting that followed his defeat in 2020? Barring a landslide victory for Kamala Harris — one that is still theoretically possible — these are the two alternative futures we face. 

But even if that Harris landslide somehow materializes, we still have another problem on our hands: Trumpism has already crossed the border, and it’s spreading rapidly among Canada’s Conservative community. Witness the spike in vote-oriented conspiracy theories in the wake of British Columbia’s recent provincial election that sound an awful lot like the nonsense that ricocheted around the MAGA political ecosystem after the 2020 election. 

It’s a striking contrast with BC’s 2017 election, one that produced an equally tight outcome but no real attempts to question the legitimacy of the province’s democratic process. As pollster Mario Canseco noted on social media, “I don’t recall any ‘the election was fraudulent’ #bcpoli tweets in 2013 (surprising result), 2017 (a tie) and 2020 (loads of mail-in ballots). Something that began in Washington, DC, on the night of Nov. 3, 2020, and culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, helps explain the difference.”

After all, the process of counting votes in BC hasn’t changed. As Vancouver family lawyer Don Wilson noted on social media, this year’s count is actually the fastest in 33 years. But that hasn’t stopped folks like National Post columnist Tristin Hopper, Freedom Convoy lawyer Eva Chipiuk or “Take Back Alberta” founder David Parker from raising doubts about the legitimacy of the process. “Regardless of your stance on whether the BC election was rigged,” Chipiuk said on social media, “it's evident that a significant crisis of trust in our institutions exists.”

The election wasn’t rigged, of course, and framing it as though it could have been is a giant tell. So too was the conspicuous silence here on the part of Conservative political leaders, whether that’s John Rustad (who, it should be noted, suggested earlier that the election rules were “rigged” in favour of the NDP) or Pierre Poilievre. On Monday evening Rustad finally broke his radio silence with a public statement that accepted the results and endorsed the work of Elections BC, only to undermine that a day later when he declined an opportunity to speak out more forcefully against the conspiracy theories being spread by some of his supporters about the election. "People have the right to say what they're going to say," he told reporters.

It’s not clear whether Rustad and Poilievre were afraid of alienating their own supporters or merely uninterested in correcting these obvious falsehoods, but their lack of courage will have consequences regardless of what’s behind it. As UBC political science lecturer Stewart Prest told CityNews, “our entire electoral process ultimately rests on our ability and our willingness to trust that those put in positions to oversee elections are carrying out their duties effectively.” 

As we’ve seen in America, the erosion of that trust can happen faster than we’d like to believe. Look to Alberta, where the issue of electronic tabulators has now reached the level of official government policy. In its recent package of “democratic” reforms, ones that include introducing political parties at the municipal level and giving the province the ability to remove elected councilors and mayors, the UCP government also banned the use of electronic tabulators across the province. As the Calgary Herald’s Rob Breakenridge noted, “there have been no reported issues with these tabulators. There will be costs resulting from banning them. As far as the facts are concerned, it’s all downside and no upside.”

Indeed, all the evidence suggests that hand-counting ballots is slower, more inefficient and more costly than using machines. As the Associated Press noted in a recent story, a New Hampshire study showed that poll workers who counted hand ballots were off by eight per cent compared to just a 0.5 per cent error rate for machine counting. “Human beings are really bad at tedious things, and counting ballots is among the most tedious things we could do,” MIT political science professor Charles Stewart said. “Computers are very good at tedious things. They can count very quickly and very accurately.”

But Premier Danielle Smith’s feelings — and, more importantly, those of the members who will vote on her leadership later this week — don’t care about these facts. That’s why her proposed changes to the Alberta Bill of Rights will apparently include “the freedom to democratically elect and recall legislators by voting through secret paper ballots to be manually hand counted.”

Yes, most of this noise is happening on Twitter/X, a social media platform that has been transformed from a digital public square into a digital sewer. And yes, the people actively trying to undermine trust in our elections and the people who administer them are a tiny minority of the overall public. But as we’ve seen in both America and Alberta (and with all necessary apologies to Margaret Mead), we should never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people — or their willingness to play with fire if it helps them rule over the ashes.