If it was up to the students of the Stikine riding, the Christian Heritage Party’s Rod Taylor would be going to Victoria.
Taylor received 183 of the 444 votes (41 per cent) cast by elementary and secondary school kids in the Student Vote program that ran parallel to the provincial election.
Taylor was encouraged by the result.
“It shows that our message is resonating with people,” he said.
Nathan Cullen, the NDP candidate who won the actual election in Stikine, came in second among students with 135 votes (31 per cent) over Liberal Gordon Sebastian (73 votes) and Darcy Repen (51 votes) from the Rural BC Party.
READ MORE: Cullen walks away with Stikine
A total of 10 schools in the riding requested ballots for the mock election, but of those, four did not return any ballots.
The school with the highest participation level was Ebenezer Canadian Reformed School (ECRS) with 250 ballots requested and 177 returned. ECRS students overwhelmingly favoured Taylor giving him 75 per cent of the votes with 132.
Smithers Secondary School (SSS) students had the second highest rate of participation with results more in line with the adult vote. Cullen pulled 46 per cent of the 166 cast at SSS.
READ MORE: Horgan’s B.C. majority came with historically low voter turnout
Atlin School, Hazelton Secondary, New Hazelton Elementary and Walnut Park Elementary also returned results favouring Cullen.
Provincially, more than 750 schools participated with nearly 90,000 kids casting ballots in every riding.
Students gave the NDP an even bigger majority government with 58 of the 87 seats in the legislature compared to 55 in the actual election, although that could change slightly after Nov. 6 when nearly half a million mail-in ballots will be counted.
Unlike in the real election, the young voters heavily favoured the Greens to form the official opposition with 17 seats to the Liberals’ 12.
Students also would have sent one Conservative to Victoria. In Peace River North, Trevor Bolin prevailed over Liberal Dan Davies by a slim margin of 353 to 337 votes.
In real life, that race was not close at all with Davies polling 5,902 votes to Bolin’s 3,679.
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