Ex-MPP sounds alarm on online voting glitches
‘They’ve seen nothing yet,’ Klees warns
As if the Ontario Conservatives needed another controversy, a former Tory cabinet minister says major glitches with the online voting system for the party’s leadership race could spell disaster, leaving thousands unable to cast a ballot.
Frank Klees, a longtime member of provincial parliament who is backing businessman Doug Ford for leader, said Friday that if the problems are not fixed by the time voting starts March 2, the entire party executive should resign.
Klees said told the National Post he was unable to register to vote online using the secret code sent to him in the mail, and then was told by a party employee that a printing anomaly meant Os appeared as zeroes, Zs as twos and Ls as ones.
He eventually managed to register, he said, by replacing a two and zero in his code with the appropriate letters — but is worried that elderly, new-Canadian and computer-illiterate members could be stymied.
“Whoever designed that system is going to exclude, I would venture to say, 75 per cent of the people who bought memberships,” the former transport minister said. “If they think they’ve had problems in the last four weeks, they’ve seen nothing yet.”
Klees sat in the legislature for 19 years and twice ran for the leadership himself. He chose not to seek re-election in 2014.
He said he has heard from many other Progressive Conservatives who have encountered similar problems.
Representatives of the party’s interim leader and the leadership organizing committee could not be reached for comment by press time.
Meanwhile, the ongoing issue of exactly how many people have joined the party got a bit muddier Friday. Tory officials delayed at the last minute an announcement on the number of memberships added from the time the leadership race began until the cut-off point a week ago.
“The data is still in the final stages,” a party source said. “We’re told there’s a bit more work to do.”
And another source suggested the PCs had passed up on an opportunity to determine what proportion of memberships gathered under former leader Patrick Brown might be bogus.
The potential of invalid memberships was raised by Vic Fedeli, the interim leader, when he took over last month, vowing to “root out the rot” allegedly left by Brown. He soon revealed the party had 127,000 paid-up members, not 200,000 as Brown had claimed. But it appears a promised audit to verify the 127,000 has never taken place.
Then, when the party arranged to mail out the secret PINs for use in the leadership election, it opted against having letters with invalid addresses returned to the Conservatives, said the source.
Had they asked for “return mail,” they could have gotten some idea of how many were “fake,” he said.
Everyone with a paid-up membership as of last Friday is supposed to be able to participate in the election, the first the party has held online.
Klees said he called the helpline after spending two hours trying to register Thursday without success, a worker telling him eventually about the confusion between letters and numbers.
“She said, ‘When they printed these letters and these codes, there was unfortunately no differentiation when the final printing came out between a zero and an O and a one and an L and a two and a Z.”
The simplest solution would be to set up a physical polling station in each riding, so people unable to register and vote online can do so in person, Klees said.
Voting is scheduled for March 2 to 8, the results to be announced March 10.