A good chunk of eligible voters have already cast their ballot ahead of the Saturday, October 19 provincial election, which should help to get results in a timely manner.

Polls will close Saturday night at 8:00, at which point the count will begin and Elections BC says we should start learning where votes fell within about 40 minutes.

A record number of people showed up to the advanced polls. A total of 1,001,331 votes have already been cast out of a possible 3,550,017. That equals 28.2% of possible voters having made their choice for who will form the next BC government. The previous record for advanced voter turnout was in 2020 when  669,215 votes in advanced polls.

Elections BC Spokesperson Andrew Watson thinks the convenience factor of voting ahead of time is a big part of the record numbers. “We often hear from voters, you know, they’re really busy and they want to cast their ballots during advanced voting to make sure that they get to participate in the election before election day.”

“We did see what we typically see during advanced voting, where the first day is quite busy. It tends to dip down a bit during the middle of the advanced voting period. So the lowest turnout day was October 13, which was the Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend. And then just pick up again as the advanced voting period comes to a close with that really big Day on October 16. So that sort of U shaped turnout pattern during the advanced voting period continued this election, and also just the really big increase overall in terms of all the advanced votes that were cast throughout BC.”

Watson says we should be able to get a good sense of who will form the next BC government shortly after pools close at 8:00 pm Saturday, October 19. “We expect the first results to start being published on our website within about 15 minutes of polls closing And our goal is to report about 50% of the results within half an hour of polls closing, and the majority within an hour. So, for sure. We’re expecting that preliminary election results on election night will be published, much quicker than they have in past BC election.”

A chart of local figures is below:

Electoral District	Oct. 10	Oct. 11	Oct. 12	Oc. 13	Oct . 15	Oct. 16	Total Advanced Votes	Total Eligible Voters
Kamloops Centre	2,842	1,906	1,425	1,211	2,468	3,127	12,979	43,618
Kamloops-North Thompson	1,312	1,945	1,403	1,082	2,384	2,837	10,963	47,773
Cariboo-Chilcotin	2,252	1,700	551	374	1,871	2,050	8,798	32,228
Fraser-Nicola	2,122	1,763	1,024	763	1,402	1,686	8,760	32,742