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OTTAWA — Jagmeet Singh’s campaign says its rivals are “confused,” denying allegations from fellow NDP leadership contender Charlie Angus’s campaign that the membership sign-up numbers Singh’s camp has claimed don’t add up.

Singh’s campaign announced earlier this week it had brought upwards of 47,000 new members to the party — more than a third of the 124,000 people the NDP announced would be eligible to vote in its upcoming leadership election.

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The party confirmed to the National Post that as of March it had about 41,000 active members in good standing. That number rose to 41,500 in May and 53,000 in July, although a party official admitted that some sign-ups from provincial branches of the NDP may not yet have been reflected in those numbers.

Photo by Nathan Denette / The Canadian Press

But Jesse Brady, a co-campaign manager for Charlie Angus’s campaign, contends these numbers don’t sound quite right.

Since Angus entered the race in March, Brady has kept an active database of all names that appeared on the NDP’s central database, which is shared with campaigns. Based on cross-referencing duplicates out of the database, Brady said he believed there were about 70,000 members in the party as of early May, before Singh announced his candidacy. This, added with Singh’s announced sign-up numbers, is just 7,000 names short of the total list. Other candidates and provincial branches of the NDP would surely have added more than that to the pile, Brady contended, so how could Singh’s numbers be accurate?