BURSTElections BC has signed off on its investigation into potential violations of the Election Act in Surrey-Guildford during the 2024 provincial election, finding no evidence of any deliberate attempt to violate the Act.
“Elections BC remains confident that voting in the 2024 Provincial Election was free, fair, and secure,” a press release issued on May 29 reads. “Election processes, including vote-by-mail, were administered in accordance with the Election Act and ensured eligible voters were able to exercise their constitutional right to vote.”
But the complainant, lawyer Honveer Singh Randhawa, is livid with the outcome and how he says the investigation was conducted.
“They’re trying to play court – this is not what their job was,” he told the Now-Leader. “They completely brushed it off, did not at all contact me for the full entire one year of investigation, or six, seven months, whatever it is. They haven’t contacted me once, they haven’t returned a single email or anything. All I got was this – we’ve concluded our investigation and, you know, the result has been posted.”
The final count in the Oct. 19, 2024 was so close between NDP MLA Garry Begg and Conservative candidate Randhawa, who is now running for Surrey mayor, that it triggered a judicial recount with a B.C. Supreme Court judge declaring Begg elected.
Randhawa on Jan. 3, 2025 filed a complaint with Elections BC alleging violations of the Act and Elections BC opened an investigation Jan. 13, 2025 with Randhawa filing a petition for an invalid election, alleging cases of multiple voting, voting by non-residents, and multiple vote-by-mail contraventions.
“The evidence available was sufficient to assess the allegations and determine there was no deliberate attempt to influence the election outcome through non-compliance with the Election Act,” Elections BC found.
Begg told the Now-Leader he’s glad it’s over.
“I seems like it’s a logical conclusion to the file and I’m glad to see that it’s done,” he said. “I was very confident in the fact that we hadn’t done anything inappropriate or wrong. I was chagrined that yes he took it to the extent that he did but gratified by the result in the end.”
Begg said the process took a long time. “Hopefully that means that they took careful consideration of all over the factors that he presented and came to the conclusion that they did.”
Randhawa, meantime, called Elections BC’s conclusion “simply self serving and a blatant disrespect and disregard to the complainant.
“What is their objective? Their objective is to show ‘we did everything right, there is nothing wrong here,’ right.”
“Their answer is…look at this, there’s nothing deliberate here but that’s not what the complaint is about, it’s not about ‘deliberate.’ The complaint is very simple – has there been a violation which affected the result? Yes, there has been violation.”
Randhawa lost the election by 22 votes.
“They haven’t answered a single question and deliberation was not the question anyway. It doesn’t have to be deliberate for violations to happen. There are different sections of the Act, some are under deliberate, some are under violations.”
He’s considering next steps.
“I’m really upset, but I’m also running this municipal election. So now my hands are so full, the timing of this nonsense is really bad, and not only that, they gave me zero opportunity. Zero – I mean ZEEERO – they haven’t asked me a single question during this. Or anything, zero. It’s just my initial complaint, and then you’ve got this. This is it, zero in between, I mean absolutely zero. It was stunning to me,” Randhawa said.
“It’s just like they’re trying to close the books. Maybe I can make a further complaint, I don’t know, but that’s just like a never-ending cycle, you know, and my complaints were not short. Seven to ten pages of complaints, I gave them so much.”