There are 71 ballots rejected in the CDN-NDG mayoral race

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Four court-ordered re-counts in Montreal’s Nov. 6-7 municipal elections are scheduled to begin on Monday just as irregularities in the voting results continue to emerge.

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The latest anomaly to emerge is the number of votes rejected in the Côte-des-Neiges – Notre-Dame-de-Grâce mayoral race.

While the official result published by Élections Montréal reports 599 invalid votes in that contest, a Montreal Gazette examination of Élections Montréal’s detailed voting results by polling place and among mailed ballots found that rejected ballots totaled only 528.

No one knows what explains the 71-vote discrepancy in the Côte-des-Neiges, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, said former city councilor Marvin Rotrand, who ran in 10 municipal elections before retiring this year.

“Are those 71 good ballots that somehow fell into the rejected category? That’s a legitimate question to ask. “

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The 71-vote discrepancy could be significant, he added, as the margin of victory for Gracia Kasoki Katahwa, the Projet Montréal district mayoral candidate who was declared the winner over Ensemble Montreal’s Lionel Perez, was 212 votes.

It is one of the races in which a judge of the Court of Quebec has ordered a recount.

In its request for a recount, Ensemble Montréal cited other anomalies, such as the fact that 40 polling stations in the Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce municipality rejected more than four percent of the votes at a rate that it was double, triple, and even five times the rejection rate of roughly two percent citywide.

Last week, the Montreal Gazette reported that it had discovered several anomalies in voting results across the city when examining detailed results by polling place. Élections Montréal has made available the vote count by voting center through open data .

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Among the anomalies, the newspaper found that two polling stations in the Pointe-aux-Trembles district rejected 73 percent and 64.5 percent of the votes cast for mayor of Montreal.

Anomalies also emerged in the counting of votes by mail. In the Côte-des-Neiges constituency, 35 of the 79 votes cast by mail for mayor of Montreal were credited to an independent candidate Beverly Bernardo of the Communist League while former mayor Denis Coderre, who ran for Ensemble Montreal, got zero. Valérie Plante, who won the election, received 37 mail-in ballots in the district, while the remaining seven ballots went to third-place Balarama Holness.

The Montreal Gazette examination also found that while about two percent of ballots were rejected citywide, the rejection rate of ballots cast for the mayor of Montreal exceeded 10 percent at 17 polling stations. . Another 45 polling stations had rejection rates in the mayoral race of about 10 percent, and dozens more polling stations rejected votes cast for mayor of Montreal at a rate that was double or triple the citywide average.

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Élections Montréal said last week that it was investigating the irregularities raised by the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Julie St-Arnaud Drolet, spokeswoman for the Quebec Director General of Elections, said Friday that her office is “paying attention” and awaiting the results of Élections Montréal’s examination and court counts.

“If there is a reason to react, we will,” St-Arnaud Drolet said. “But we will start by making sure that there are indeed irregularities.”

Court accounts could reveal “minor or major errors,” Rotrand said.

If it is the latter, he will question other results, he said.

The four stories that will begin on Monday were requested by Ensemble Montréal. In addition to the position of mayor of the municipality in Côte-des-Neiges – Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, there will be counts for the position of councilor in the Loyola district of the municipality, for the mayor of the municipality in Rivière-des-Prairies – Pointe-aux-Trembles and for the city councilor in the Pointe-aux-Prairies district of that municipality.

The Projet Montréal de Plante has requested two recounts, one for the mayor of the municipality of Outremont and the other for the city councilor in the district of Tétreaultville in Mercier – municipality of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. The party said last week that a judge was deliberating on its requests and is expected to issue a ruling this week.

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