The hearing on last September’s Saint John Harbour election results was back in court today.
Liberal candidate Gerry Lowe narrowly defeated PC Barry Ogden. Ogden wants a number of ballots rejected due to voting irregularities.
The court heard testimony and evidence from expert witness Peter Loewen, a professor in political science at the University of Toronto with a specialty in elections.
Loewen presented a report on two methods that could be used contested election cases to determine the potential effect on the election outcome.
His tests were created as alternatives to the “magic number test,” which is used frequently in contested election cases. It follows that if the contested votes are equal to or greater than the margin of victory, the election results will be thrown out.
Loewen says that method unfairly punishes leading candidates.
He says his “naive test” and “informed test” offer a more realistic way of looking at rejected votes, and their potential impact on election results.
The naive test looks at the rejected ballots, their possible distribution among candidates and how that changes the result of the election.
The second method, or the “informed method,” uses known voter preferences and actual election numbers, such as probability of success, and splits up the rejected votes that way. Loewen says this method is “transparent and reliable.”
Using those numbers and the rejected votes, this method determines how the votes would be distributed and what the result would be.
Applied to the case of Saint John Harbour, that chance of change is “vanishingly small.”
The probability of success for Lowe was 0.501 per cent, and Ogden’s had 0.499 per cent.
With his math, if there were 50 rejected votes, the chance of Lowe winning those votes is 25 times higher than Ogden’s chance of closing the gap.
Loewen believes the informed test is the better test as it uses actual, known data, but that both methods are better than the magic number test.
Loewen was cross-examined by Ogden’s lawyer Matthew Letson during the afternoon session, which wrapped up the week-long hearing.
Judge McLellan will hear arguments from both teams on July 30th.
