Editorial cartoon of a northern polling station where rejected ballots tumble from a ballot box beside a broken election stopwatch
Cartoon: the missing ballot choice becomes a northern election receipt.
Elections BC’s preliminary results list 303 rejected ballots in Peace River North, or 2.82 per cent of ballots reported.

Peace River North is no longer just the riding where the BC NDP failed to put its name on the ballot. It is now the riding where the rejected-ballot count became part of the record.

My Prince George Now reported Tuesday that a sharp increase in rejected ballots in Peace River North is raising questions about whether voters made ballot-box mistakes or deliberately sent a message. The report noted the riding had only two candidates to choose from, neither representing the NDP or the Greens, and quoted UNBC political science lecturer Jason Morris saying rejected ballots can be accidental but can also be used as political protest.

The hard number is in Elections BC’s preliminary results: 303 rejected ballots in Peace River North, equal to 2.82 per cent of considered ballots. The same preliminary table lists only two named candidates: Conservative Curtis Whitford and Independent Jordan Kealy. No BC NDP candidate appears on that 2026 ballot.

BC Ballot’s riding page shows the political result was not close. Whitford led the initial count with 8,957 votes, or 85.75 per cent, while Kealy had 1,489 votes, or 14.25 per cent. That does not make the missing NDP line harmless. Elections are not only about likely winners. They are also about whether voters are offered a normal democratic choice by the governing party that asked the province for an early mandate.

The comparison with 2024 is stark. BC Ballot records that the BC NDP ran Ian McMahon in Peace River North in 2024 and received 828 votes. Elections BC’s 2024 statement of votes recorded 18 rejected ballots in the riding. In the 2026 preliminary count, the rejected-ballot number is 303 — more than sixteen times the 2024 total.

Nobody can prove the intent behind each rejected ballot from the count alone. Some ballots are spoiled by mistake. Some may be blank. Some may be protest votes. That uncertainty is exactly why the official number should be treated carefully, not exaggerated. But the governing-party failure beside it is not uncertain: David Eby’s NDP entered a snap election without a candidate in Peace River North.

That is the accountability point. A party can lose a riding. It can run a weak campaign in difficult territory. What it should not do, after choosing the election clock, is leave an entire riding without its own standard-bearer and then watch the rejected-ballot pile become a news story.

For northern voters, this was not an abstract campaign-process problem. It was the ballot in front of them. The official record now shows two candidates, no NDP option, and 303 rejected ballots. That is a receipt the party cannot spin away.

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