Thousands of Conservative party members who voted at 13 remote voting stations in the recent leadership contest did not have their names checked against the electronic voters list to make sure they had not also voted by mail, the chairman of the organizing committee said Monday.

“The remote locations were doing that by hand, so that would have been just crossing people off the membership list,” said Dan Nowlan.

That means that their names were removed from paper lists, not the central database, as had been planned.

Last week, Maxime Bernier and his supporters raised concerns about the process because more than 7,000 ballots were cast without having been registered in the database system — known as a strikeout list — that the campaigns used in their get-out-the-vote efforts.

That party says that strikeout list — which was created on the party’s Constituent Information Management System — is unofficial, and the discrepancies are unimportant.

However, Bernier campaign workers, who were shocked to lose to Andrew Scheer, remain hard to convince. They’re worried that some voters may have voted twice, once by mail and once in person at the 13 polling stations set up around the country.

“At a local polling station, if you aren’t checking against CIMS, which they freely admit was not going on, and all our reports from the field are that it was not going on, you could come in and say, ‘Hey I’m here to vote,’ and have already mailed your ballot in, and vote twice,” said one senior campaign official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Nowlan said Monday that it should not have been possible to vote twice because although the local polling stations were using paper lists, they should not have included the names of people who voted by mail.

“They would have printed the list Saturday prior to 10 a.m. (eastern), and if they had voted by mail their names would have shown them as having voted, they wouldn’t have been allowed to vote,” he said in an email.

Members of the Leadership Election Organizing Committee were told during briefings that party officials at the local polling stations would have been removing names from the electronic voters’ list, which is not what appears to have happened.

“That was the design,” said one committee member, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Whether or not that happened, I don’t know.”

“Absolutely,” said another. “I would be shocked if it wasn’t.”

Last week, Bernier told The Globe and Mail that the party needed to explain what happened.

“Is this a minor issue, is this not a minor issue? I want answers from the party. I think members have a right to know what happened and why there is a difference between the numbers of votes.”

Conservatives in Ottawa, who are trying to put on a show of unity after a long, divisive leadership race, appeared irritated by his complaints on Monday. Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu blamed it on “sour grapes on the part of the Bernier campaign.”

An official from another unsuccessful campaign is also wondering about double voting.

“It is a possibility,” he said. “Had I taken my ballot and mailed it in I could have gone to a local polling station and indicated that my ballot was destroyed. Having said that, and I was part of the scrutineering process, everything seemed fair and above board. I do believe the time to raise concerns was during the walk through of the process.”

Last week the party appeared to overstate its certainty about the process. President Scott Lamb called it an “audited, final result.”

In fact, Deloitte Canada participated in the process but did not audit it.

In a statement at the convention in Toronto on May 27, Deloitte’s Doreen Hume told delegates that her group provided “independent observation of certain processes.”

“During the course of completing our procedures, we did not identify any exceptions to the application of those rules and procedures in determination of the election result.”

Hume did not respond to an email seeking more details.

Nowlan said that he has no doubts that the party ended up with the leader that members selected.

“I can’t believe anyone would look at that process and say that the process itself didn’t produce the result that the members voted for. I don’t think anybody could logically say that.”

Sources in the Bernier campaign say that they expect an affidavit from a whistle-blowing party official will be made public later this week raising concerns about the process.