FREDERICTON -- New Brunswick's chief electoral officer wants to address the snafus that delayed the release of Monday's provincial election results by asking a judge for a special audit, a spokesman for Elections New Brunswick said Friday.
Paul Harpelle, the agency's communications director, said Michael Quinn will seek a consensus from an all-party committee for an audit that would provide a random sampling of the voting results from a number of ridings.
"He's going to recommend this be considered," Harpelle said. "He still will have to go before a judge. Only a judge has the authority to release the ballots."
The audit would likely involve recounts by hand, but the details will be worked out with the committee, Harpelle said.
Under provincial law, a judge with the Court of Queen's Bench must grant a recount if a candidate or voter requests one in an electoral district that has been decided by 25 votes or less.
That threshold was met in the riding of Saint John East, where Liberal Gary Keating defeated Progressive Conservative Glen Savoie by eight votes.
The Progressive Conservative party could not be reached for comment.
If the margin of victory is greater than 25 votes, a voter or candidate can still request a recount, but they must pay a $200 fee and submit reasons for their request to the Court of Queen's Bench.
The deadline for seeking recounts is at end of the business day on Tuesday.
On election night, the Opposition Liberals led by Brian Gallant defeated the governing Progressive Conservatives by taking 27 of the legislature's 49 seats. David Alward's Tories held on to 21 seats and the Green party elected their first member to the legislature, party leader David Coon.
Quinn's decision to seek an audit came as Elections New Brunswick confirmed that the unofficial results released early Tuesday were correct, except for a few minor discrepancies that did not affect the outcome in any riding.
"We remain confident that despite the troubles that occurred with uploading results to the website and media on election night, which caused a delay in reporting the final results, the counting of all votes cast was done accurately and did not change the outcome of the election," Quinn said in a statement.
The problems started Monday around 10:15 p.m. AT, when the Elections New Brunswick website used to feed voting results to the media suddenly hit a glitch and votes started disappearing from some districts.
Toronto-based Dominion Voting later blamed an off-the-shelf program that was supposed to transfer polling data from an Elections New Brunswick computer server in Fredericton.
The flow of voting results stopped for about two hours while technicians worked on solving the problem.
The delay prompted speculation about the validity of the election, which was the first time New Brunswick used optical ballot scanners -- 713 of them provided by Dominion Voting -- to count ballots in a provincial election.
During the process of confirming the final, unofficial results earlier this week, five ballots were discovered that had not been processed by poll workers through the scanners on election night. Three of the ballots contained legitimate votes while two others could not be counted because more than one candidate was marked on them. But neither of the five ballots changes the outcomes of the elections in those ridings.
Gallant is scheduled to be sworn in along with his cabinet on Oct. 7.
