Today (October 4) early voting is happening at City Hall for a Vancouver council by-election.

Nine candidates are competing for a seat that was left vacant in July when Vision Vancouver’s Geoff Meggs resigned to take a job in the office of new NDP premier. The actual election date is October 14.

The top candidates include Hector Bremner (Non-Partisan Association or NPA), Diego Cardona (Vision Vancouver), Mary Jane Dunsdon (Sensible Vancouver), Pete Fry (Greens), Judy Graves (OneCity), and Jean Swanson (independent).

The by-election will also fill nine positions with the Vancouver school board.

The last time that Vancouver held a by-election was all the way back in September 1992.

That year, the left-wing Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) councillor Bruce Yorke resigned due to an illness and the centre-right NPA’s Lynne Kennedy was elected to fill his seat.

Kennedy won with 11,573 votes, according to newspaper reports of the day (the city’s website only makes official results available back to 1996).

In 1992, there were 269,580 Vancouver residents eligible to vote but only about 10 percent of them actually came out to cast a ballot for the by-election that year.

Kennedy’s 11,573 votes means she secured her seat on council with just 4.29 percent of the electorate supporting her.

Her closest competitor, COPE's Mel Lehan, received 9,840 votes and Rod Raglin placed third with 1,441 votes.

During the last municipal election, in 2014, there were 411,741 residents registered to participate in the election.

If whoever wins the October 2017 by-election only requires the 4.29 percent of the vote that Kennedy received, it means Vancouver could see its vacant council seat filled by the actions of just 17,676 citizens.

In 2014, the Vancouver council candidate who received the lowest level of support but who was still elected received 56,831 votes. It just so happens that was Geoff Meggs.

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