Every vote counts - we have proof!

Never scoff again when someone tells you that every vote counts. 

A recount in the Montreal area riding of Terrebonne yielded an almost unbelievable result: after the initial count found that the Bloc Québécois has won the riding by an ultra-slim margin of 44 votes, a recount found that, in fact, the Liberals scraped in by just one single vote! 

After the recount, Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné of the Bloc garnered 23,351 votes, while Liberal Tatiana Auguste registered 23,352, the closest result in recorded history. The swing gives the Liberals 170 seats in parliament, still two short of a majority.

In fact, this riding has already seen an earlier flip: on election night, the seat was initally given to August by 35 votes. It swung to Sinclair-Desgagné by 44 votes after a standard validation process.

The recount is a process that automatically clicks in when a result is within 0.01% of the total votes, considered the margin of potential error. Three other judicial recounts are underway in other close calls, but none of them give the Liberals a path to a majority.

This would probably have caused riots in the USA, so it's a testament to the robustness of the Canadian system that the revised result (and the recount itself) has been accepted with good grace. I wonder how Ms. Sinclair-Desgagnè is feeling today, though?

UPDATE

Terrebonne is not finished with its controversy yet. That single vote lead? It may just have disappeared. Emmanuelle Bossé, a voter in the riding has come forward to say that her mail-in ballot - for the Bloc Québécois, of course - was returned to her as undelivered, apparently because of an incorrect postal code on the envelope's pre-printed address.

So, in a riding with over 60,000 voters, the Terrebonne election looks to be dead heat. Elections Canada is still figuring what to do - this has never happened before - but a whole new election in the riding may be in prospect.

What occurs to me, though, is: was Ms. Bossé the only person in the riding to use a mail-in ballot? Were other mail-in ballots sent with the correct pre-printed address? How could just one pre-printed envelope be wrong? Elections Canada says this was the only such incident it was aware of. Stranger and stranger...