Sunday, November 28, 2010

Another question for Elections BC

This is troubling.
Elections BC refused to approve the recall petition in Ida Chong's riding based on rules it created after the petition was submitted. It appears incompetent to have failed to have the rules in place, as the Times Colonist noted in an editorial here.
The legislation sets a 200-word limit on the petition. Elections BC ruled MLA counts as five words; HST as three. So the petition was over the limit under the new rules.
An Elections BC official defended the retroactive decision to create the rules.
"The methodology used for word counts had never been an issue in the past because all previous recall applications had come in at well below 200 words," she said.
It's not a compelling defence.
Worse, it's also untrue, as The Gazetteer, establishes here. There haven't been that many recall campaigns; voters should expect better from Elections BC than false statements to defend its decisions.

5 comments:

RossK said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Don't worry Paul. This is only a minor setback and you can be out knocking on doors in Oak Bay shortly.

Norm Farrell said...

Maybe, the Acting Chief Electoral Officer, didn't have time to get the rules in place. It seems that, contrary to Section 5(3) of the BC Elections Act, Craig James is engaged in a number of other offices.

http://northerninsights.blogspot.com/2010/11/rewarding-work-if-you-can-get-it-and.html

RossK said...

Apologies to Mr. Willcocks and his readers....

I deleted my comment at the top of the post where, in trying to give credit to where credit is due regarding where the information about the original Skeena petition came from, I may have given a clue as to the identity of a commenter on another website who may very well wish to remain anonymous.

Thus, despite the fact that it was inadvertent, I felt compelled to remove my original comment here.

Anonymous said...

PW's "WikiLeaks" post has a comment about breast cancer that is actually a 'no follow' code that blocks anyone from posting comments.

Basically somebody is censoring the post.