Guernsey’s newly elected Deputy, Ross Le Brun will be entering the States with far fewer votes behind him than his political colleagues, but he says he has a mandate from the public and he will do all he can to ensure the public’s voice is heard.
Just 4,673 votes were cast yesterday – nearly 1,000 fewer than the number of people who voted for Deputy Sarah Hansmann Rouxel in June 2025, when she polled 38th to claim the final seat in the States.
Deputy-elect Le Brun will now take up the 38th seat in the States with just 953 votes behind him.
But he told Express that it doesn’t matter.
“In law I do (have a mandate). People chose to not vote, that’s not my issue. My issue was getting in. I used the full legal fair process, and I’m in.
“The one thing that was different with this one is there was only one vote. There wasn’t 38 so people couldn’t say ‘well, I don’t want Le Brun in, so I’m going to vote for 38 others’. There was no game playing in this (election). It was probably the fairest, and it was definitely the hardest, because there was only one seat for 11 candidates. In the last election, there were two candidates for one seat.”
There are 27,520 people on the electoral roll for the by-election meaning the turnout yesterday was just 17.32%, compared to a 72% turnout last summer.
As well as the 4,673 people who did vote yesterday some also turned out to protest against the by-election itself or the candidates with six leaving their papers blank and 110 spoiling their papers.
Registrar General of Elections, Colette Falla said despite the low turnout and the high number of spoiled papers, she thinks the by-election went well.
“I think it’s been a success in many ways. For example, we used electronic electoral rolls for the first time, which made voting very quick through the polling stations and will also help us to pull off more information at a later date. In terms of turnout, it is lower than we had planned for, but we did see a steady stream of people coming through the polling stations throughout the day.”
Pressed on the future of island wide voting, Ms Falla said that is a matter for deputies to deal with.
“The question of island wide voting is really a completely separate matter that, as you know, the States Assembly and Constitution Committee recently issued a survey on, and so I think that will will inform what happens next, far more than this particular by-election.”
She added that the by-election was a success in terms of organisation, and that 11 candidates made it viable.
“It was certainly a real competition and that’s really good. It meant that voters had a fairly wide choice.”
Despite the turnout being low, and just 4,673 votes needing to be counted, the declaration was delayed until the early hours of Thursday morning after an ‘anomaly’ was discovered with the ballot papers.
The number of votes cast recorded at the four polling stations and the number of postal votes, exceeded the total number of ballot papers received at the count at Beau Sejour by seven.
The election volunteers were tasked with counting again, and they started with the approximate 1000 postal ballots.
It’s not clear where the anomaly lay, but those waiting for the declaration were told that the margin was narrowed to two and as that falls within election guidelines the result was signed off, and Mr Le Brun was duly elected.
“We needed to satisfy ourselves absolutely that we had the right numbers,” explained Ms Falla. “We double checked the ballots that had come in from polling stations, and we double checked our postal vote numbers and then when we were satisfied that we had the same number twice, then it wasn’t until then that we declared a result.”