Vancouver Election 2026: Voters to decide whether Ken Sim gets second term

It’s election day in Vancouver as voters head to the polls to choose who will lead them for the next four years.

For everything you need to know about how and when to vote in Vancouver’s municipal election, click HERE.

If you’re still undecided on who to vote for, check out our preview story about the major issues and priorities within Vancouver.

Then follow along our live-blog HERE throughout the day and night for the latest election day news from across the Metro Vancouver region, and check back here where we’ll keep this post updated all night with Vancouver election results and reaction.

Vancouver voters will choose whether to give ABC Vancouver, which swept to power in the last election, another four years or to go in a new direction.

There could be a high desire for change at Vancouver city hall, recent polling suggests. But with seven established parties running slates of council candidates and five mayoral hopefuls between them, there are many different possibilities this time for what change could look like.

Incumbent Mayor Ken Sim and his party ABC Vancouver dominated the 2022 election, with the new party’s entire slate of candidates topping the polls for council, park board, and school board. Since then, the size of that ABC caucus has shrunk, with a series of politicians leaving the party, many of whom are now running against their former party.

Rebecca Bligh, elected as an ABC councillor in 2022 before being expelled from the party in early 2025, is trying to take Sim’s job, running for mayor with new party Vote Vancouver, alongside a slate of council, park, and school board candidates.

Kareem Allam, who managed ABC’s winning 2022 campaign and briefly served as Sim’s chief of staff after the election, has started a new civic party called the Vancouver Liberals and is its first mayoral nominee.

Allam’s Liberal slate features other ex-ABCers, including park board candidate Scott Jensen and council candidate Victoria Jung. Jensen was elected in 2022 as an ABC park commissioner before leaving the party over Sim’s failed attempt to abolish the board, while Jung was elected as an ABC school trustee but quit the party in 2024 over the ABC councillors’ attempt to halt the work of the city’s integrity commissioner.

Colleen Hardwick is running for mayor along with a slate under the TEAM for a Livable Vancouver banner. Another former running mate of the incumbent mayor who became a rival, Hardwick ran for councillor with the Non-Partisan Association when Sim was the party’s mayoral candidate in 2018. Sim narrowly lost that year’s mayoral race, but Hardwick was elected and served four years on council. She also ran for mayor in 2022 with TEAM, finishing third.

The Green nominee Pete Fry is the only major candidate for the mayor’s office who is not a former ally of Sim, and polling suggests the two-term Vancouver councillor could pose a threat to the incumbent.

A Leger poll conducted for Postmedia News between Sept. 23 and 30 showed Fry just slightly ahead of Sim among likely voters, followed by Allam, Hardwick, and Bligh — but with the poll showing more than a third of respondents still undecided, the outcome is far from certain.

Many Vancouverites have already made up their minds, and a record number of them cast their votes before election day.

More than 103,000 voters cast a ballot over four advance voting days this year, the city reported, a 59 per cent increase over 2022, and more than 21,000 voters requested vote-by-mail packages this year, more than double the last election. In Vancouver’s 2022 election, a total of 171,494 ballots were cast, equating to 36.3 per cent of registered voters.

COPE and OneCity, two left-leaning parties, are both running slates of council, park and school board candidates, but no mayoral candidate. The two parties and the Greens entered into a three-way agreement earlier this year to limit the number of candidates between them, so as to not split the progressive vote, and COPE and OneCity’s respective mayoral candidates withdrew from the race in early September, paving the way for Fry as a unity candidate.

In addition to the main parties, a handful of smaller parties and independent candidates are also running. A full list of candidates is available on the City of Vancouver website.