Elections Canada rejected more than 43,000 mail-in ballots it claimed arrived after the deadline in the last federal election, raising fresh questions about the integrity of the vote. Blacklock's Reporter says the figure, disclosed through Access To Information, comes as the House affairs committee prepares to review election management this fall.Out of 618,612 requests for mail-in ballots, only 466,058 were returned and counted. That left 118,258 ballots uncounted, with 37% — or 43,455 — stamped as “late.” .The agency would not say whether electors were given enough time to receive and return their ballots, admitting, “There are no tracking mechanisms in the field that allow us to determine how many special ballot voting kits left Elections Canada offices on any given day.”It remains unknown whether the tossed ballots could have changed the outcome in close races. Four ridings went to judicial recounts: Terra Nova-The Peninsula in Newfoundland and Labrador, Milton East-Halton Hills South and Windsor-Tecumseh Lakeshore in Ontario, and Terrebonne, Quebec.The Terrebonne recount handed Liberals a razor-thin one-vote edge over the Bloc Québécois, the closest result since 1963. The Bloc has since launched a court challenge, with Elections Canada acknowledging it mislabeled ballots in the riding..The agency has faced other controversies, including mishandling 822 ballots left in a Coquitlam, B.C. office that were never counted. Blacklock’s previously reported cases where voters never received ballots in time to participate. Even Elections Canada officials conceded deadlines were “tight,” with ballots sometimes mailed out just five or six days before voting day.The 2021 election also saw 1,589 ballots in Mississauga-Streetsville, Ontario, go uncounted after sitting in a commercial mailroom past the deadline. In total, Elections Canada received 9,410 complaints about its conduct, ranging from accessibility concerns and long lineups to disputes over special ballot handling.
