Votes in Toronto byelection counting very slowly, Liberals narrowly ahead of Tories

Conservative candidate Don Stewart remained hopeful late Monday despite trailing his Liberal opponent in the Toronto-St. Paul's byelection where results were extremely slow to come in.

Conservative candidate Don Stewart remained hopeful late Monday despite trailing his Liberal opponent in the Toronto-St. Paul's byelection where results were extremely slow to come in.

"Let's not give it up," he said, in a brief stop at his campaign party at a Jewish restaurant in the riding, around 11:30 p.m.

For most of the night he had trailed Church by between 400 and 500 votes, but when he spoke, still only one-third of the polls and less than 9,000 votes had finished their count.

And with more than 10,780 votes case in advance polls, the results are far too close for anyone to call.

But the story of the night thus far has been the snail's pace of vote counting, as a ballot that is nearly a metre long with 84 candidates on it is plaguing poll workers trying to get the results counted.

It took more than an hour after the polls closed at 8:30 p.m. for any results to be reported as poll workers had to unfold each ballot like a map before scanning 84 rows of names for the X.

A protest group calling themselves Longest Ballot Committee stacked the ballot with independent candidates to draw attention to the drawbacks of the first-past-the-post system.