I went to Victoria yesterday (great day to be on the deck of BC Ferries, by the way) to see, first-hand, how Elections BC is counting the 700,000+ ballots in the TransLink tax plebiscite.

It was pretty amazing to see thousands of ballots (including many, many NO votes) being processed. It's a labour-intensive process, as a few dozen paid staffers have to pull an envelope out of another envelope, get that inside envelope cut again, and pull out the actual ballot. 

Those ballots are then transported to another facility where they are scanned into three machines for tabulation (they can do more than 10,000 an hour apparently). No one on the ground has access to those counts, and they are held by just a few Elections BC officials.

Any ballots that are in doubt due to odd markings or other issues are handchecked by an Elections BC official. While I was there, one was flagged for having whiteout on it - the voter had whited-out a YES vote and darkly marked the NO circle. It was considered valid.

The Elections BC folks were professional and generous with their time when it came to answering my questions. No TransLink or regional officials are anywhere near the count. In a way, it's an advantage to have this done on the Island, where they have no skin in this game.

I also, sadly, saw a big bin of votes that came in too late to be counted. They had put a big skull and crossbones on the bin to make sure they weren't included in the count. Hard to believe we had 12 weeks to vote and people still got in too late.

The Elections BC folks did note one difference from the HST vote: less swearing on the ballots and envelopes.

I'm comfortable we're going to get a fair count from Elections BC. It sounds like they're on pace for the last week of June.