If you ever thought your vote doesn’t make a difference, this might change your mind.
A three-day hearing is underway in Canada to decide whether a single vote that went uncounted because of an administrative error should overturn a result in April’s elections for the national legislature.
Liberal candidate Tatiana Auguste won the electoral district of Terrebonne, north of the city of Montreal, by just one vote, flipping a seat that had long been held by the Bloc Québécois, Canada’s Quebec separatist party.
The highly unusual one-vote victory brought Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ruling Liberal Party, with 169 seats in parliament, closer to the 172 seats it needed to form a majority government in Ottawa. The Bloc Québécois have 22 seats.
Carney won the election in a stunning comeback for his party, abetted by US President Donald Trump’s threats to enact sweeping tariffs on Canada and annex the country as the 51st US state.
But Bloc Québécois incumbent Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné challenged the result, after a voter came forward to say her mail-in ballot, which she had cast for her, had not been counted.
Terrebonne resident Emmanuelle Bossé told public broadcaster CBC Radio-Canada in May her ballot was returned to sender because of an incorrect postal code on the return envelope provided by the national elections commission.
According to statements filed in the case at the province’s top court, an Elections Canada employee discovered he had mistakenly printed his own postal code on dozens of ballots in the lead-up to election day, according to the Canadian Press news agency.
“I wasn’t the one who got Elections Canada’s address wrong on the envelope,” Bossé told Radio-Canada. “Elections Canada glued this label on the envelope.”
Bossé said she was upset her vote hadn’t been counted, especially given how close the race was.
“I voted for the Bloc,” Bossé told Radio-Canada. “So it was maybe the vote that could have changed something.”
The election result was muddled from the start. Auguste was initially projected to win the seat by just 35 votes. But following a standard validation process, Terrebonne went to Sinclair-Desgagné by 44 votes.
The tight race triggered a judicial recount – required by law for any race won by a margin of less than 0.1%. Following the recount, Auguste was renamed the winner on May 10 with a total of 23,352 votes – just one more than Sinclair-Desgagné.
In Quebec’s Superior Court this week, lawyers for both candidates put forward competing arguments over whether the result should be upheld, or if a new election should be called.
Sinclair-Desgagné’s lawyer Stéphane Chatigny told the court Monday that solidifying the election result would “send a disastrous message to voters” and “undermine public confidence,” according to Canadian Press.
Meanwhile, Auguste’s lawyer Marc-Étienne Vien said cancelling the result would “deny the right to vote” of the tens of thousands of Terrebonne residents that cast their ballots in April.
David Baum, lawyer for Elections Canada, told the court elections are “not designed to achieve perfection,” according to the Canadian Press.
“It’s a big, complex machine, and errors are inevitable,” Baum said.
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