Ontario Tories extend voting to Friday

TORONTO — Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party, fending off criticisms about the system to elect its new leader, has given members more time both to register for the right to vote and actually cast their ballots.

A senior party source confirmed on Saturday that the organization has extended the voting deadline, pushing it back from March 8, to noon on March 9.

Earlier in the day, the party also announced it was extending the voter registration deadline for the second time in one week. Party members originally had to register to cast their online ballots by March 2, but the party extended that deadline to March 5 before ultimately setting it at noon on March 7.

Some of the four candidates currently vying to take the party reins have criticized the complexity of the voting system.

The race had to be organized after former leader Patrick Brown abruptly resigned in late January amid sexual misconduct allegations.

The Tories, whose membership management system was hacked in November, implemented a two-step process to verify the identity of voters, which requires party members to submit photo ID and wait to receive a special code in the mail.

At least one of the campaigns previously said that scores of members were still waiting for that document even as the voting period began.

Concerns have been raised about the possibility of membership fraud through the use of prepaid credit cards. Some candidates argue payments made through them cannot be tracked, which makes it impossible to verify that the person buying a membership is the person who casts a ballot.

Hartley Lefton, chair of the leadership organizing committee, previously stated that the party was aware of, and working to resolve, concerns around the mailing of voting documents.

Despite the changes to both the registration and voting windows, the party source said the date the new leader is announced has not changed. The results of the leadership contest are still slated to be revealed on March 10.

The leader will be determined using a ranked ballot, in which voters pick their preferred candidates and can select a second, third and fourth choice.

The winner is whoever receives more than half the total electoral votes. If no one crosses that threshold on the first round, whoever has the fewest votes, or less than 10 per cent, gets eliminated and those votes get redistributed to whoever was marked as the second choice. This continues until a winner emerges.