September 22, 2014 (2014-09-22) 39th → 13 41 42.73% 34.65% Start date September 22, 2014 | 13 seats, 34.42% 42 seats, 48.84% 27 21 0 seats, 4.54% 0 seats, 10.41% | |
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Winner Brian Gallant | ||
The 38th New Brunswick general election was held on September 22, 2014, to elect 49 members to the 58th New Brunswick Legislative Assembly, the governing house of the province of New Brunswick, Canada.
Contents
- Timeline
- Tabulator problem and manual recount demand
- Retiring incumbents
- Progressive Conservatives
- Liberals
- Candidates
- References
The 2013 redistribution reduced the size of the legislature from 55 seats to 49.
The New Brunswick Liberal Association, led by Brian Gallant, won a majority government, defeating Incumbent Premier David Alward's Progressive Conservatives, which became the second single-term government in New Brunswick's history. The New Democratic Party, led by Dominic Cardy won the highest support in its history, though failed to win any seats. As a result of these losses, both Alward and Cardy resigned as leaders of their respective parties. The Green Party of New Brunswick improved on its results from the previous election, with party leader David Coon winning the party's first seat, and becoming only the second Green politician (after British Columbia MLA Andrew J. Weaver) elected to a provincial legislature.
Fracking was a major issue in the election as a whole. Most commentators described the election as a referendum on it.
Polling in the weeks leading up to the campaign gave the Liberals a wide lead over the governing Progressive Conservatives. Some commentators openly speculated about whether the Liberals were on track to repeat the 1987 provincial election, when they won every seat in the legislative assembly. As the campaign progressed, however, the gap in popular support between the two parties narrowed significantly. Some attributed this in part to a television interview with CBC New Brunswick anchor Harry Forestell in which Gallant gave inaccurate numbers relating to his proposal for a tax increase on the province's wealthiest residents. In the final poll of the campaign, the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives were tied at 40 per cent support each.
Timeline
Tabulator problem and manual recount demand
The election marked the first time that the province used electronic vote tabulation machines from Dominion Voting in Ontario in a provincial election. They had previously been used in New Brunswick municipal elections. On election night, the machines displayed vote totals which were verified by Elections New Brunswick officials and entered into a province-wide database for the media. By 11:45 PM, these unverified numbers were to have been replaced by totally machine-reported numbers from the tabulators themselves with no human interventions or errors possible to distort results. It was "a program processing the initial results that had a glitch", not the tabulators themselves, according to officials.
Elections New Brunswick grew uncomfortable with the human involvement and influence of the unevenly tabulated results. It brought the results reporting to a standstill as counts were reverified by hand before further resignations or concessions were triggered.
At 10:45 p.m. Atlantic time, Elections New Brunswick officially suspended the results reporting count, with 17 ridings still undeclared, while it investigated the delay. It called for over sixty tabulator count devices to be brought to central locations for verification without uploading via Internet and thus without relying on the flawed reporting program. However at no time was there an allegation of major fraud by any party or public official.
As a result of this controversy, both the Progressive Conservatives and the People's Alliance of New Brunswick called for a hand count of all ballots, with the former refusing to concede the election until the following day. Despite this, Michael Quinn, the province's chief electoral officer, has said that no recount is necessary.
This was largely reported as a technological and competence "fiasco" with implications not just for tabulators but for voting machine and Internet voting in the future. Later, recounts were held in 7 of 49 ridings and the results were upheld with variations of no more than 1 vote per candidate per riding.
Retiring incumbents
The following sitting members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) have announced that they will not re-offer at this election:
Progressive Conservatives
Liberals
Candidates
New boundaries are in effect as a result of an electoral redistribution replacing the districts used in the 2006 and 2010 elections. Candidates had to file their nomination papers by September 2, 2014 to appear on the ballot.
Legend