The complete federal election numbers are finally in, having been validated Oct. 20 by the riding’s returning officer and released by Elections Canada.
Of the 62,008 votes cast, 230 ballots were rejected bringing the total to 61,778 valid ballots in Cowichan-Malahat-Langford after the final count.
The victor was clear on election night — NDP candidate Alistair MacGregor. He ended up with a tidy 22,200 votes, good enough for 35.9 per cent.
The race for second place flipped back and forth on Oct. 19 but when the dust settled Liberal candidate Luke Krayenhoff was the runner up with 14,685 votes, or 23.8 per cent.
His Liberals went on to steam roll through most of the country and make up a majority government, despite a strong NDP showing on Vancouver Island.
Conservative candidate Martin Barker ended up third, with 14,091 votes, or 22.8 per cent while the Green Party’s Fran Hunt-Jinnouchi made strides for her party, eclipsing the 10,000-vote mark with 10,462. That means 16.9 per cent of all voters in the riding opted to choose Green.
Support for the greens in the Nanaimo-Cowichan and Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca ridings hovered around eight per cent in the 2011 election.
Rounding out the list of candidates, Marxist-Leninist candidate Alastair Haythornthwaite received 340 votes, or 0.6 per cent of the total ballots cast.
In the end, the voter turnout for the region was 77 per cent — up more than 10 per cent from the 2011 election and significantly above both the provincial and national averages of 70 and 68.5 per cent respectively.