British Columbia's election is seeing record early voting, but heavy rain could affect turnout on Saturday

British Columbia's election has already seen record early voting ahead of Saturday's main event, but a torrent of atmospheric rain expected across much of the province's south coast could disrupt Elections BC's long-planned efforts to reverse the worsening trend low voter turnout.

Andrew Watson, chief communications director for Elections BC, said more than 28 per cent – just over a million – of all registered voters have already voted, but that doesn't mean more people overall will vote before the polls open at 8 p.m. Saturday night Clock close clock PST.

He said the agency aims to make voting more accessible: in the last provincial election, voter turnout was less than 54 percent of the 3,524,812 eligible voters. But the rain doesn't help.

A 2018 study by two University of Ottawa scientists of voter turnout in five federal elections this century found that every millimeter of rainfall reduced the number of voters by more than 0.1 percentage points, while higher temperatures prompted more people to vote to give away.

Mr Watson said his agency had taken measures to protect the province's 1,243 polling stations from the effects of the wet and windy weather.

“We have been working with BC Hydro to ensure they know where all of our polling stations are located so that we can respond quickly to power outages,” he said. “We also have manual backup procedures at polling locations in the event that election officials need to resort to a paper-based process.”

Environment Canada issued a weather warning Friday, estimating 40 to 70 millimeters could fall in and around Vancouver on Saturday. Meanwhile, mountainous areas of Vancouver Island could see more than 200 millimeters of rain, with the heaviest torrents expected in the morning and early afternoon. B.C.'s River Forecast Center has also issued a flood warning for the south and central coasts.

Elections BC is using technology to identify voters more easily and count ballots much more quickly.

Polling station workers can identify voters using an encrypted electronic system that allows voting lists to be updated in near real time. Anton Boegman, B.C.'s chief electoral officer, told reporters during a news conference shortly after the campaign began that this information will also be shared with political parties to support their efforts to get more voters to the polls.

In previous years, staff had to use paper to identify voters as voters, which meant it took much longer to pass that information to parties, he said.

Electronic tabulators will be used across the province to count ballots. The system has been tested in by-elections in each of the last two years. Mr. Watson said the agency's goal is to have about half of the votes counted and reported to the public within half an hour of polls closing on Saturday evening, and to reach a majority within an hour.

Official results are usually announced after about 45 minutes, he said. In the 2017 election, the complete counting of votes took two exciting weeks due to tens of thousands of mail-in ballots. In this contest, the Green Party of three MLAs finally agreed to support the New Democrats, ending the Liberals' 16-year rule in British Columbia.

Voters will elect 93 members of the Legislative Assembly, with a single party needing 47 seats to form a majority government. That's six more MPs than in the last election, as six additional seats were added in the major population centers in southern British Columbia

Four are in the Greater Vancouver communities of Langley, Surrey, Burnaby and Vancouver, one in the Victoria suburb of Langford and another in the Kelowna urban core.

With reporting by Justine Hunter and The Canadian Press