What a ballot. What a glorious ballot.
One hundred and thirty Vancouverites put their good names beside an empty oval and asked for your vote. Fifty-six of them fought over ten council seats; the rest ran for mayor, park board and school board, twenty-seven seats in all. More than 209,000 of us turned up to sort through them, and the count didn’t wrap until after two in the morning. It wasn’t flawless. It was ours.
I’ve always had a soft spot for independents and fringe candidates, so a shout-out is owed to the Independent Parks Party. These brave fools didn’t just register an official party: they wrote an exquisite, evidence-based, parks-focused platform. No seats this time, but hats off, and I hope to see more of you. One note: your website is gank, and it needed its own scraper code. Worth it.
That’s fringe done right. Fringe as protest is the Longest Ballot: 214 names in an Alberta by-election, where most of the activists, kooks and music video artists🎵 got one vote, and 76 got none at all. Most of Vancouver’s 130 drew tens of thousands, and even our last-place finisher got 347. Their ballot was long to prove a point. Ours was long because 130 people meant it.
At the other extreme is our provincial ballot: three or four ovals, and a party logo doing most of the talking. Here you get a long scroll of neighbours, and a borrowed Sharpie.
How Election Digest held up
Election Digest set out to strip campaign material down to sourced commitments and stances, with no spin, no scores and no rankings. On that, I think it delivered. It filtered out the vague and the empty, and every line it kept points back to where a party or candidate said it.
And people used it, to democratic effect. Not just me: voters built their ballots in it, shared and compared PDFs with friends and family, and carried them into the booth. That was the whole point of the thing, and I’m proud of it.
I used it too, to research my own ballot, and as a voter I found it fell short in three ways.
It was too much. The commitment lists were long and detailed, and a long list is hard to digest, which rather defeats the name. A voter needs to see the shape of a platform before the details.
It couldn’t compare. Parties often staked out positions on the same issue that differed in subtle but real ways. The 50-metre pool is the perfect example: every party that took a position wanted one, and they disagreed only on where, when and who to blame. Election Digest made you hold those differences in your head across separate pages. Putting them side by side isn’t taking sides. Next time, it will.
It ignored pedigree, and that isn’t lossless. Election Digest judges candidates on what they said they’d do, not on who they are or who vouches for them. For a neutral record, that’s still right. But I changed one of my own votes because my sister-in-law told me a candidate was “smart as hell,” and I believed her. No platform line could have told me that. A known blind spot is better than a curated one, but it’s still a blind spot.
What’s next
- Await official results. The City declares the official count on October 21. When it does, this page will be updated with the final numbers and more detail.
- Lock the 2026 record. Freeze the campaign as it stood on election day: every commitment and stance, sourced. That is the baseline the new council will be measured against.
- Try what Election Digest should have been. Using the 2026 capture, experiment with cross-party grouping, summaries and side-by-side comparison, without judgement.
- Make My Ballot look like the real thing. The real ballot lists last names first, in capitals, with a number:
#999, DOE, Jean. Where that number comes from is still to be researched. - Update the Vancouver edition with the new council, three days after its first sitting.
- Prototype peanutpod, tooling that lets elected officials engage with the record of what they ran on.
Editorial analysis
Congratulations to “Our Guy,” Mayor Pete Fry, and to every one of the 27 people who won a seat.
Fans of “the left” (myself included): toot your horns. This one was hard-won and worth savouring. Take it as the pendulum swinging, and enjoy the ride.
Daily Hive has called the new council a “left-wing and progressive supermajority.” On paper, it is one: with Mayor Fry, the three left parties hold ten of eleven votes. I hope it never acts like one. Nothing this city just did should rest on one bloc, let alone one person. COPE, the Greens and OneCity came up through different movements and want different things. A 130-name ballot didn’t elect a bloc; it elected people. The point of having three parties, plus ABC, isn’t lockstep. It’s consensus, built in the open: where they agree, where they split, and why.
Fans of democracy should pause. The ballot was glorious, but the result was markedly disproportional. ABC took about 28% of council votes and won one seat, by ten votes. That seat belongs to Mike Klassen, warrior and survivor, the last of ABC’s 2022 sweep still standing. At-large voting rewards tight slates over broad support, and by most reasonable accounting a proportional council would have given ABC two or three seats. Shrug at that this year, and you never get to say “electoral reform” in a Reddit shitpost again.
Left-wing and progressive supermajority: throw a toques-and-toddies street party or two, with wicked art and DJs. You fought for this, you won it, and you earned every bit of it. Be proud. Love it, own it, cherish it, learn from it. Then take the big swings. The knocks are coming. Take them, and take them again. Then love it, own it and learn from it all over again. And keep going, because we’re counting on you.
We’ll be watching, line by line, on the record.