LEADERSHIP VOTERS A SMALL PERCENTAGE OF PC MEMBERSHIP

The Ontario Progressive Conservatives still have tens of thousands of iffy names on their rolls, with well under 10 per cent of their supposed members turning out to vote for a new leader in some ridings.

On Friday, party people were putting out total provincewide numbers: about 70,000 people had gone through the cumbersome process the party laid out for members to prove their identities and get online ballots to pick a successor to ex-leader Patrick Brown. About 64,000 had actually voted.

That’s a big number, a number any party would be proud of. It’s still way fewer than half the potentially eligible voters on the party rolls, and an internal party tally shows the missing members are not evenly distributed. More than half of them are in just a handful of ridings around Toronto.

Leadership organizers have produced regular updates on the number of people who’ve jumped through the hoops and cast ballots, broken down by riding. The Wednesday-night tally, with one day left in the two-week period members had to demonstrate they were eligible to vote, showed the Progressive Conservatives with 200,683 members. That would put the party back at the number of members Brown boasted about having shortly before his pants-driven downfall.

Tons of those members are concentrated in just a few ridings, mostly in the Toronto suburbs.

Brampton East is the standout across the whole of Ontario. The Tories claim 18,710 registered members there, a gobsmacking number in a riding whose total population is about 122,000. It’s a new constituency, being contested for the first time provincially in June, but in 2015 the federal Conservative candidate got only 10,600 votes there. And now the provincial Tories have almost twice that many paid-up members, apparently.

The average riding, according to the Tory document, had 1,605 members, a number pulled way up by a very few Brampton-Easttype constituencies. The median (a tie between Hamilton Mountain and Mississauga-Erin Mills) had 921.

So Brampton East had by far the most official Tories of any riding in Ontario and it had the lowest verification rate as of Wednesday night. Just 811 people were verified to vote there, 4.3 per cent of all the purported Tories. Across Ontario at that point, the rate was 33 per cent, and again a handful of outliers skewed that number down. The median was 58 per cent.

Brampton East did have a knock-down fight for the party nomination at the end of last year, when the eventual winner Simmer Sandhu claimed to have signed up 7,000 members to defeat Naval Bajaj and Jarmanjit Singh. Maybe there were that many real live Tories who signed up for the nomination vote, then immediately wandered off.

If so, maybe Mississauga Malt on, just south of Brampton East, had a similar problem. A four-person nomination race there ended with 12,467 members on the rolls. Hardly any of them seem eager to vote for the new party leader — only five per cent had verified themselves by Wednesday night.

In Brampton West, 4.9 per cent of 7,268 official members were verified by then. In Mississauga East-Cooksville, 6.5 per cent of 6,134 members.

It turns out, according to senior Progressive Conservatives, that under Vic Fedeli’s interim leadership the party has done almost no scrubbing of its membership rolls.

Shortly after taking over from Brown, Fedeli announced the Tories had about 133,000 members. That was a lot fewer than the 200,000 Brown had claimed earlier in January, and many people assumed Fedeli’s crew had gone into the databases with torches, burning out all the cobwebs and garbage.

In fact, most of the difference was because of memberships that lapsed around January.

The current 200,000 names on the rolls are real in the same way — they’re the 200,000 names Fedeli inherited from Brown, minus people whose memberships lapsed, plus people who’ve signed up to vote for Christine Elliott, Doug Ford, Caroline Mulroney or Tanya Granic Allen (or, for the short period he was in the race, Brown again). They’re not 200,000 audited, guaranteed-legit people.

We reached out to Fedeli and Hartley Lefton, the head organizer of the leadership race, but hadn’t heard back by Friday afternoon.

The verification process to vote for party leader is cumbersome. Members have had to wait for physical letters with unique codes, then upload the codes with identification documents to a website to prove they’re real people with real memberships. The Tories are making people go through it because, essentially, this is the audit.

Thirteen ridings in all had verification rates under 20 per cent as of Wednesday night. Twelve of them are in the Toronto suburbs and the 13th is Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas, where police are still investigating the possibility of fraud in the nomination vote. Between them, one day short of the deadline to verify, those 13 ridings accounted for 73,550 of the “missing ” Tories.

The lowest verification rate in Ottawa at that point was in Ottawa West-Nepean, at 38 per cent of 1,832 members. That’s where the riding executive quit in protest over a nomination eventually overturned once Brown was gone. The voting rolls included dozens of purported members in one apartment building where riding president Emma McLennan’s private-eye work found almost none of their names appeared on the lobby buzzboard.

Ottawa-Vanier had a verification rate of 40 per cent. KanataCarleton, 50 per cent. The best Eastern Ontario performer was Carleton, with nearly 73 per cent of its 993 Progressive Conservative members verified as of Wednesday evening. Lots of ridings have very solid-looking numbers, but not all.

Fedeli said the other day he’s confident he’ll turn the party over to its new leader with a clean bill of health. That’s probably overstating it a bit. Sometimes even once a cold is gone, the cough sticks around a surprisingly long time.