Andrew Scheer’s early leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada is off to a rocky start.

Earlier this week, Mr. Scheer appeared to be doing all the things a new leader should do. He met with members of his caucus who supported his leadership rivals in a public show of unity. In the House of Commons, he questioned the Liberal government on a number of transparency and accountability issues, including the appointment of Madeleine Meilleur as official languages commissioner. This is the role of the opposition — to ensure the government is transparent and accountable.

He may have to turn his attention now to his own party on that front. Yesterday, questions surfaced about the legitimacy of the vote count process in the Conservative party leadership race — questions that were quickly dismissed by CPC spokesperson Cory Hann as “human error”.

Mr. Hann also spoke with iPolitics executive editor Stephen Maher and repeated the explanation. He told Maher that the lists provided to leadership campaigns included only the mail-in ballots and those that were cast in-person at the Toronto Congress Centre. The source of the discrepancy, he indicated, was the votes from 13 other physical voting locations from across Canada.

That doesn’t explain all of the “mystery ballots” that were counted, however. What we know from the Conservative party website is that these 13 locations did not include any locations in British Columbia, for example — yet the ballot discrepancy in B.C. amounts to 660 votes.

Sixteen ridings had fewer ballots counted than cast; in Simcoe North, 12 ballots were cast but not counted and not accounted for in the spoiled ballots. Human error — the explanation provided by the party — might account for half of the discrepancy. The other half remains a mystery.

Looking at the data provided to iPolitics, we have run the riding-by-riding comparison and calculated the total discrepancy value of the votes, to determine the value in points.

What we can see very clearly is that the total discrepancy has a first-ballot-points differential of over 2,026 points. This means that if the “mystery ballots” had not been counted, the first ballot count would have been different by +/- 2,026 points. This total difference comes mostly from the point value of the extra votes cast, which accounts for 1,787 points, but the extra ballots/fewer ballots counted also dilutes the value of the existing known ballots by another +/- 239 points.

This discrepancy on the first ballot would have been compounded on subsequent counts and the differential increases to as much as 2,500 points on the final, thirteenth ballot count — which Scheer won by just under 600 points.

Of course, we don’t know who those extra ballots were counted for. The only thing we know for certain is that the ballot counts would have been significantly different (+/- 2026) without the “mystery ballots” being counted.

Scheer won the leadership by approximately 7,000 votes. The discrepancy is over 7,500 ballots and accounts for over 2,000 points. These numbers throw in to question the legitimacy of the voting process — and perhaps even the leadership of Mr. Scheer.

Cory Hann and the Conservative Party of Canada owe Mr. Scheer a plausible and credible explanation. They owe it to the other twelve candidates who ran for the leadership as well — especially to Maxime Bernier. Perhaps most importantly, they owe an explanation to the members of the Conservative party who cast a ballot — somewhere between 133,896 and 141,362 people.