A consensus hardened in Conservative Ottawa this week that Maxime Bernier and his sore loser friends had to forget about their disappointment at the leadership results and throw their unconditional support behind leader Andrew Scheer.

Tony Clement and Bernier dutifully tweeted their support, and Clement was in town, ready to do the new leader’s bidding.

I’ve said it before but let me repeat: I support @AndrewScheer as #CPC‘s new Leader. Unconditionally. #cdnpoli — Tony Clement (@TonyclementCPC) June 6, 2017

As I stated on election night: I support our new leader Andrew Scheer. Unconditionally. — Maxime Bernier ???????? (@MaximeBernier) June 6, 2017



Bernier, however, was nowhere to be seen — apparently taking a break in Florida — and it is anyone’s guess as to whether he really feels like coming back in the fall to serve as a backbencher opposition member when he came so close to being leader.

It is understandable why Conservatives are urging Bernier to choke down those sour grapes, since continued division and uncertainty only helps the party’s rivals, but it’s also understandable why Bernier and his people are having a hard time swallowing the results.

Scheer won with 50.95 per cent to Bernier’s 49.05 per cent in a complicated weighted-vote system, which could theoretically mean that as few as 66 votes could have separated the two men.

The party says 141,362 valid ballots were cast in the race. But only 133,896 voters had their name crossed off the electronic list used to make sure that every voter only cast a single ballot. There appears to be no record of who cast 7,466 votes, including 4,000 who voted at 13 polling stations across Canada and more than 3,000 whose ballots weren’t properly processed at the ballot-counting centre in Toronto.

There were also 10,429 ballots spoiled, mostly mail-in ballots that had the wrong ID included.

It’s not hard to see why these numbers make Bernier’s people deeply suspicious, particularly given that some of the people running the election know that Bernier would have shunted them aside in the party apparatus had he won, whereas they would keep their jobs under Scheer.

It doesn’t help that the party rules call for the results to be audited, which they were not, although the party president said they were. It also doesn’t help that the party didn’t tell anyone about the thousands of potentially fishy ballots until Glen McGregor did a story on the discrepancy.

Everyone else in the party thinks Bernier and his pals are out to lunch, in part because they counted their chickens before they hatched and started thinking too much about who they were going to fire rather than getting out the vote.

But every other Conservative in Ottawa — the MPs, lobbyists and staffers — have an interest in rallying behind Scheer now, in part because it’s foolish to do otherwise, and in part because they need his favour.

Pollster Quito Maggi, of Mainstreet Research, who polled the race for iPolitics, has looked closely at the numbers and says he is not prepared to discount entirely the possibility of cheating. He has compared the identified vote among the group of people stricken off the voters list and can’t find the support that put Scheer over the top.

“I have to believe in the data. It tells me 90 per cent of the polling error came from the last 7,500 ballots. That just doesn’t add up.”

Maggi thinks the number of Scheer votes among the ballots that just happened not to have been stricken from the list looks suspiciously high, but on the other hand, maybe his polling was wrong.

Nobody has presented a coherent conspiracy theory to show how there could have been mischief under the noses of all the scrutineers and honest party officials who were counting the ballots. Bernier has sent a letter to the party with dozens of questions, which the party is apparently trying to answer. If those letters are someday made public we might eventually better understand what happened.

But either way, it won’t much matter, because Scheer is now the leader and every day grows more entrenched.

If Bernier and Scheer were competing in a riding election for a seat in the House, Bernier could got to court and argue that because the number of fishy ballots is larger than the gap between winner and loser, a judge should toss the result and call a do-over.

A judge ordered the Borys Wrzesnewskyj-Ted Opitz election in the 2011 election in Etobicoke Centre to be rerun, and although that order was overturned when the Supreme Court decided some ballots were insufficiently fishy, the law allows for do-overs in riding races.

There is no similar law governing Conservative Party leadership races. Even if Bernier could prove that he had been cheated, a judge would be unlikely to overturn the result.

The results are final. There can be no appeal.

If you were Bernier, would you really want to know?