They only come out on July 22. And April 1.

Bob Wakeham, who used to be a journalist, spouts this Newfoundland nationalist crypto-separatist conspiratorial drivel today in the pages of something that ought to know better:

There’s also intrigue in the possibility that the July 22 vote actually favoured Responsible Government, but that the British-Canadian combo of contrivance ordered the count surreptitiously reversed, a scenario that has been making the rounds in Newfoundland for decades, ever since the alleged confession of a retired English civil servant that he was part of the illegal manoeuvre that gave Confederation its victory.

There is nothing wrong with this ludicrous claim that a clothbound copy of Peter Neary's Newfoundland in the North Atlantic World couldn't fix, if the conspiracy theorists would just take off their tinfoil hats and bonk themselves on the head with it.

Then they could read the book, too.

Meanwhile, here's a challenge for Bob Wakeham and his loathsome ilk:

In the second referendum on July 22, 1948, Confederation took 78,323 votes compared to Responsible Government's 71,334. If, as you suggest, the count was "surreptitiously reversed", then you have some interesting math to do.

You see, the district-by-district vote counts are also available. And, interestingly enough, the district-by-district results are entirely consistent with what was predicted before the vote, and what was discussed afterwards. St. John's and the Avalon voted Anti, Labrador and Newfoundland-beyond-the-Isthmus voted Confederation. Your "surreptitious reversal" hypothesis somehow has to take this well-known pattern into account.

Since you can't simply reverse the overall total without doing violence to the historical pattern, you somehow have to reverse the results in a certain number of districts, but not all of them, in order to change a net 6989 votes from Confederation to Responsible Government. If, in making up this 6989-vote change, you reverse the result in a a district so as to give it a result that is not consistent with the historical voting pattern, you have to be prepared to explain the inconsistency. And in at least one district, Labrador, and possibly one or two others, you will be further constrained by the fact that poll-by-poll results also exist, and are again consistent with the voting pattern that was expected, which puts them all but off-limits for vote-flipping.

So there you have it, Wakeham and conspiratorial company. Since the conspiracy is your theory, you should either prove it, or shut up about it, even if — no, especially when — couched in the weaseliest of conditional phrases.