Stephen Best’s choice for Progressive Conservative leader has changed almost every week since the whirlwind race kicked off a month ago.

At first, Caroline Mulroney was a no-brainer because she was the only candidate supporting a carbon tax.

When Mulroney switched her position, Best did, too. The Guelph resident decided to cast his ballot for Doug Ford in the online leadership vote running March 2 to March 8.

Cue Patrick Brown. The former and now-aspiring leader’s controversial bid to replace himself caused a new shift for Best. If Brown sticks to the carbon-pricing pledge that’s embedded in his People’s Guarantee platform, Best says he will vote for him.

But he doesn’t actually want Brown or any other Tory to take the premier’s seat in the June 7 general election. Best is trying to best the system — like a Trojan horse in the PC camp.

In fact, he is a Green party supporter.

Best explains he generally wants to see party leaders looking out for the earth. “It would be good for the environment and dealing with climate change if all three (major) parties were on board with carbon pricing,” he says. (The Ford flirtation reflected a different tactic: he figured a Ford-led party would lose the election, benefiting the Greens and other parties.)

“It costs $10 to vote,” he says. “I thought it was a pretty good deal.”

The rules set by the Tories allowed Best to buy a $10 membership, fill out an application form and have a say in who becomes the next chief.

Best’s machinations are not illegal and will likely not distort any result. But such gaps in the system, combined with other membership concerns in a party under scrutiny, could raise questions about the integrity of the leadership race.

Membership and voting rules vary widely across parties, and the process to choose a leader is only as transparent as a party wants it to be. The stakes are particularly high in the PC race.

The Tories have led for months in most polls, even after the recent mayhem. It’s more than plausible that members will be effectively voting for the leader of Ontario’s next government.

Brown’s candidacy was approved Wednesday, exactly one month after CTV reported allegations of sexual impropriety that Brown denies, and which triggered his rapid ouster. Party members have also raised questions about Brown’s personal finances.

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Interim Conservative leader Vic Fedeli has been investigating apparently inflated membership rolls: 67,000 fewer members than the 200,000 Brown boasted of earlier this year. There have been allegations of misspending; a hack into the party’s database; and accusations of voter fraud and ballot-tampering in some local nominations. Fedeli booted Brown from caucus last week, hours before he registered his bid to lead it again. Brown’s rivals are Mulroney, Ford, former MPP Christine Elliott and social conservative activist Tanya Granic Allen.

Trust among provincial PCs is at an all-time low, says Georganne Burke, a longtime Conservative adviser. She most recently worked on Andrew Scheer’s victorious federal leadership campaign.

“The (membership) list itself is in such question for most members,” says Burke, who’s backing Ford. “We don’t know how many people are still in the system as actual current members … I really have minimal confidence in that.”

Is this any way to pick a potential premier?

“We have complete confidence in the reputation and practice of a nationally recognized accounting firm that we have chosen to serve as our independent auditor in this process,” says Hartley Lefton, chair of the party’s Leadership Election Organizing Committee.

The party is using a new two-step verification process, and members will cast ballots through a “secure remote electronic voting” system. Sources say Dominion Voting is running the vote and Deloitte LLP is auditing it.

The party also says it approved spending just over $1.4 million “to improve the election process of our new leader,” in an excerpted memo obtained by the Star’s Robert Benzie.

Members need an individual PIN code to register to vote, which the party started mailing out in letters this past week. They must register before midnight on the first day of polling. Once their registration checks out, they are emailed another unique PIN, to vote.

Voters will log on to the party website, punch in a 12-digit PIN and then scan or upload two pieces of identification, such as a driver’s licence or hydro bill.

It’s unlikely the information can be verified in real time, but turnaround is expected every 48 hours or so.

Last year, the PCs faced allegations from a rather unlikely source that fraudulent memberships were purchased in Milton ahead of the nomination contest. Faisal Elahi, the vice-president in charge of fundraising for the federal Liberal association, received a letter claiming he was a member in good standing with the party, and instructions on where and how to vote in the provincial nomination.

But the longtime Liberal never bought a membership. He posted the letter to Facebook at the time saying he “was made a member of the PC Party without my knowledge,” and claimed he received “quite a few phone calls from my friends getting the same letter.”

Generally, online balloting poses a perennial risk across the globe, says David Dill, an associate computer science professor at Stanford University. He’s also the founder of VerifiedVoting, a group advocating transparent and secure elections.

“If it’s a secret ballot then by definition you can’t figure out who cast those ballots,” he says. “Suppose some people stole PINs or got PINs who shouldn’t have gotten PINs and voted … It’s impossible for them to figure out which ballots are fraudulent.”

It’s also pretty simple for someone to fudge a utility bill or ID, Dill says. “Why would that be adequate?”

At any rate, if all checks out, the member can vote. A computer at election headquarters spits out a ticket showing how she voted and in what riding, but not her name. That gets fed into a tabulation machine and included in the final count.

It’s a process that needs to be more transparent, says Burke, the longtime Tory adviser.

“Anyone who tells you there is no such thing as voter fraud clearly has never ever worked on an election,” Burke says. “I’ve seen it up close and in a very unpleasant way over many occasions.

“I’m not saying necessarily any election is decided by fraud, but it is there and it could be a bigger problem.”

Burke was on the ground in last year’s federal leadership race, which was not without its own controversy. The Conservative Party of Canada removed more than 1,000 memberships after probing accusations that one campaign was using untraceable prepaid credit cards to sign up fake members.

That’s against party rules, which say a membership must be bought with an individual’s own money. It’s the same at the provincial level.

“Seeing things like that happen in my party, I found it very distressing,” Burke says. “I don’t think you have to (commit fraud) in order to win … But if you’re organized and if you really want it bad enough, you can do these things.”

Dill notes other potential dangers. Phishing scams could direct someone to a bogus website so it looks like they’re voting on the official page, but a bad actor could save the credentials and PIN, change the ballot picks, and forward it on to the actual site without anyone knowing.

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“We live in a world where there are botnets of literally millions of computers controlled by unknown people, and the people who own those computers don’t know that their computers are infected,” he says.

Mike Morden, research director at Samara Canada, a democracy advocacy group, says parties play a “gatekeeper role” when it comes to bringing ordinary people into politics, but remain very unregulated, other than financial restrictions.

That’s an “exposed flank in our democracy,” he says.

“We’re kind of in this funny in-between place where you’re not having really rich party deliberations … and it’s very easy to sign up new members temporarily to kind of flood a nomination or a leadership race. But it’s also not mass participation like a primary in the United States.”

Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch, says irregularities, including people joining parties they don’t support, point to flaws that can run deeper.

“It’s a concern because you never know when things that threaten the integrity of the vote might actually end up changing the result in an unfair, unjust way,” Conacher says.

He says an independent regulator, like Elections Ontario, should oversee and audit political parties.

In this most unusual pre-election season, Brown’s candidacy itself was up in the air. This unprecedented scenario offered another glimpse into how democracy functions within parties, which during normal times is of interest only to wonks.

Brown now sits as an Independent MPP (Simcoe North), kicked out of the PC caucus. He got the thumbs-up from a provincial nominations committee to run, again, for the party’s nomination in Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte.

But that wasn’t before roughly three dozen of his supporters charged that the party was cherry-picking democracy. They made the accusations at a rally outside PC party headquarters, where Brown was being vetted.

“There was a sense that democracy was at risk,” says Courtney Raphael, who lives in the Beach and says she was never involved in politics until after she got to know Brown because she’s friends with his sister, Fiona.

It’s significant that Brown’s fate was decided by the very committee he empowered, as part of a beefed-up vetting process for local candidates that followed controversies. The same committee once disqualified a contender for a nomination for allegedly filming someone that appeared to be eating a hamster off of a hockey stick. The would-be candidate claimed it was poutine.

Raphael says it should be up to the PC electors to decide Brown’s future, not the higher-ups behind closed doors. She says Brown should be on the ballot because he paid the requisite $100,000 total cost of admission and got the 100 signatures needed.

“People feel that their vote was being taken away from them” when Brown was turfed, Raphael says.

Stephen Best, the Green supporter, may not agree with his fellow card-carrying PC on many policies. But he and Raphael are aligned when it comes to their ability to participate in the party process — for better or worse.

“People should be actively engaged about politics in the community,” Best says.

Others have tried to have a say in Tory politics, for various reasons. Whether that’s a democratic flaw or privilege is perhaps up for debate.

Simon Henderson, who runs a parody @DougFordFacts Twitter account, is encouraging his followers on social media to buy memberships and vote for anyone but Ford. His friends and family regularly sign up for federal and provincial Conservative parties to have a say in who leads them.

“In all cases it was to keep extremist candidates away from power,” he says.

Ryan Lindsay joined the federal Conservatives during the leadership race, part of a campaign to “Stop Kellie Leitch,” whose policies he opposed. He’s been buying memberships in the major parties provincially and federally in the last five years or so, but mostly aligns with the Greens. He says he didn’t have time to join before the truncated PC leadership vote.

“You tick a box every four years. To me that’s not the spirit of democracy,” the Toronto resident says. “So for 10 bucks I can at least have one or two or three more opportunities to have some kind of influence.”

VOTING POINTS SYSTEM

The Ontario PCs use a points system that lets each member vote, but the tally isn’t as simple as counting the ballots to determine who wins.

Each riding is worth 100 points that are allocated proportionately to the candidates based on their share of votes. The process is repeated 124 times and the points get added up.

Advocates argue the weighted version of one-member, one-vote is more democratic, but perhaps less entertaining than delegate conventions.

Premier Kathleen Wynne’s leadership was sealed, at least in part, when her leadership opponents, and many of their delegates, dramatically crossed over to her camp.

The New Democrats use a modified one-member, one-vote system to elect their leader, with 25 per cent of the vote given to unions.

The PC party also uses a ranked ballot, where members rank the choices in order of their preference, but it’s not against the rules to only tick off the box of your choice for leader.

If a candidate doesn’t get a majority of the points, the candidate with the least points is eliminated and their votes are distributed to the second choice marked on that ballot. That continues until a victor emerges with a majority.

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