NDP's Loyal Wooldridge and Conservative's Kristina Loewen are neck-in-neck as the final Kelowna-Centre ballots are being counted.
As ballot boxes were counted starting at 8 p.m., there was never more than a one per cent difference in the votes cast for each, as preliminary results were posted live on Elections BC.
With one ballot box left to count, Loewen sits on top with approximately 10,680 votes. Wooldridge has about 10,520 ballots cast in hist favour, less than 200 votes behind the Conservative candidate.
More than 24,700 votes have been counted in the riding.
This is the first election in the new Kelowna-Centre riding. With 33,265 registered voters (as of Oct. 7), 9,579 people voted in advanced polls.
The riding includes downtown Kelowna from Cadder Ave north to McKinley Road and everything west of Highway 97 to Okanagan Lake. The University of BC Okanagan campus was included in the Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream riding.
The candidates who ran in the new riding included NDP's Loyal Wooldridge, Conservative's Kristina Loewen, Green's Bryce Tippe, and Independent candidate Michael Humer.
There were a total of 3,550,017 people eligible to vote in the 2024 B.C. election.