The Conservative Party’s explanation for the discrepancy between vote lists in its recent leadership contest doesn’t make sense, says pollster Quito Maggi, who has been comparing the party’s membership lists with the strikeout lists it provided to campaigns.

“It does not add up,” he said Thursday.

Earlier Thursday, the party’s director of communications said an apparent discrepancy between raw vote totals and the strikeout lists provided to the campaigns can be explained by off-site voting.

Andrew Scheer won a razor-thin victory over Maxime Bernier on Saturday, winning with 50.95 per cent of the vote to Bernier’s 49.05, which means that as few as 66 votes might have made the difference between winner and loser. The discrepancy between lists that campaigns are wrestling with is more than enough to make up the difference between the two candidates.

The party says that 141,362 votes were counted on Saturday, but strikeout lists sent to all the campaigns appear to show a smaller number of votes tallied: 133,896, plus 10,429 incomplete or spoiled ballots.

This difference has some campaigns wondering: Where did 7,466 votes come from?

“There appears to be a discrepancy,” said the campaign manager for one unsuccessful candidate, speaking on condition that his name not be used. “There seem to be 8,000 extra votes.”

Cory Hann, director of communications for the party, said Thursday that the strikeout lists sent to the campaigns included mailed-in ballots and ballots cast at the convention centre in Toronto, but not ballots cast at 13 other polling locations across the country.

“The Saturday list that they received does not include the polling locations,” he said. “That does not include in-person voting locations.”

But Maggi, who spot-checked some of the riding results on Thursday, says that Hann’s explanation can’t be correct.

“Not at all,” he said. “The situation absolutely has to be more complicated because there are more ballots counted in certain ridings that didn’t have a voting location within reasonable distance.”

For instance, Maggi says raw vote results downloaded on the night of the convention show 10 more votes were cast in two Thunder Bay ridings than appear in the strikeout lists. The nearest in-person polling location to Thunder Bay was in Simcoe Grey, a 13-hour drive away.

“There are more votes in ridings that were not eligible to vote on the day of voting,” said Maggi.

Hann insisted that the process was rigorously overseen.

“The ballots themselves are the important piece here,” he said. “Those were always in control and overseen by the party, by the scrutineers, by Deloitte etc.”

Hann told CTV on Thursday that “human error” may be behind minor discrepancies between the vote totals.

The party has not released a riding-by-riding breakdown of raw vote totals, and doesn’t intend to do so, Hann said.

“All the numbers that we’re going to release are online now.”

Hann’s assurance may not answer all outstanding questions.

“Uh huh,” said an official with an unsuccessful campaign. “So release the data. Why shred the ballots until after you get all numbers to balance? Margin was less than one per cent.”

Maggi was comparing the strikeout lists to raw voter data downloaded on election night by Kevin O’Donnell, an Ottawa party member who scraped it from the website of Dominion Voting Systems as it uploaded them to the party website.

“It’s a file I retrieved directly from the vendor,” he said in an interview on Thursday.

Hann said he could not verify the data file O’Donnell downloaded and the party doesn’t plan to release its own vote totals.