Days before its leadership vote, the BC Liberal Party’s election organizing committee has made some significant decisions on how the vote will be conducted that have further estranged many of the candidates’ campaigns.
The party’s Leadership Election Organizing Committee (LEOC), which has heard complaints from six of the seven leadership camps that a majority of the party’s new memberships do not comply with its rules, has conceded it cannot fully review each one to see if it meets criteria.
The committee wrote the campaigns this week to say party staff has tried to reach everyone whose memberships were deficient. “We have not been successful in all cases,” it wrote.
One of its solutions: permit new members in non-compliance to re-enter amended information this week to meet the rules. It wrote this week to campaigns that it believes the majority of these problems involved applications for members at invalid addresses, payment for their memberships by a family member not at the same address, or a secondary address being provided instead of a primary one.
In the weeks leading up to the vote Feb. 3-5, the six campaigns – all but that of former cabinet minister Kevin Falcon – have argued there are irregularities in the membership information. Their estimates of the problematic memberships range from 50 to 60 per cent of the new recruits, about 24,000 of the roughly 40,000 signed up during the leadership race. The Falcon campaign has strenuously denied any wrongdoing and suggested other campaigns’ criticism is racialized and excludes many South Asian and Chinese voters who may have simply had difficulty in filling out their membership forms. Falcon’s campaign notes that many members are living in multi-generational large homes and that it’s not unusual that they share email addresses or phone numbers.
Compounding their concerns, the complaining campaigns were surprised this week by two matters involving the American firm overseeing the vote: people can vote from anywhere in the world, when many campaigns thought people had to be residing in British Columbia, and there won’t be a limit to the use of an individual IP address on election day, when many campaigns thought there would be a limit of 10 from an individual address.
The party will limit one IP address from casting more than 10 votes in one minute, but campaigns say it will mean that someone can simply wait a minute and cast another 10 votes.
In its 2018 leadership race, there were complaints of “vote harvesting,” in which one person with a lot of individual codes could cast many votes from the same IP address. What that means is that someone other than a member is likely casting the vote. The complainant campaigns say this problem could occur again next week.
Campaigns have complained that member addresses provided were in parking lots, on forestry service roads, or didn’t exist. They said they would visit residences where there were members, only to find they didn’t live there – or if they did, weren’t aware of their memberships, didn’t know there was a BC Liberal Party, much less that there was a leadership race under way.
Caught in the middle of this is an organizing committee that clearly didn’t bank on such controversy. Its plan all along was to audit about 10 per cent of the memberships, and in the end it appears it will fare a bit better than that in auditing about 6,000. Campaigns are being briefed on this regularly and indicate there are still about 1,000 audits to be done before voting next week.
The party earlier told campaigns that it was committed to identifying non-compliant memberships and disqualifying them. But it has softened that stance to permit errant membership applications to be corrected up until Wednesday, long after the initial December deadline.
The party’s returning officer, Stacy Robertson, wrote campaigns earlier in the week to say: “It is my opinion, shared by the LEOC co-chairs and BC Liberal party staff, that members with genuine mistakes on their membership application should have every reasonable opportunity to fix those mistakes.”
He later writes: “I trust that all of you will recognize that it is in the party’s best interest to allow individuals who intend to be members of the BC Liberal Party to correct the deficiency and be part of the leadership election process.”
Sources in four campaigns believe the do-over is inappropriate as a remedy. They wanted a far more comprehensive audit to weed out non-compliance. “We operated on the basis that we had to ensure any member we were bringing into the party was in compliance with the rules and that their membership information was accurate,” said one campaign chief.
The members will cast what is known as a preferential ballot in which they can list not only their first choice but second, third and subsequent choices among the field of seven candidates. When the lowest-voted candidate drops off the following ballot, his or her supporters’ votes then transfer to their next choice.
Candidates to succeed Andrew Wilkinson as BC Liberal leader include political strategist Gavin Dew, developer executive and former cabinet minister Kevin Falcon, MLA Michael Lee, former BC Chamber of Commerce CEO Val Litwin, MLA Renee Merrifield, MLA Ellis Ross and developer Stan Sipos.
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
