Elections Canada is working with the Conservative party to resolve the fallout from its decision to remove 1,351 fraudulent memberships — purchased with pre-paid credit cards — from the party membership rolls.

On Tuesday, Elections Canada spokesperson Diane Benson confirmed the agency’s involvement in the matter, but said she wasn’t at liberty to elaborate. The Conservative party didn’t respond to multiple requests for comments throughout the week.

“Elections Canada is working with the Conservative Party to resolve any issues,” Benson wrote in an email that also cited relevant sections from the Political Financing Handbook for Leadership Contestants and Financial Agents.

Section 2.3 of that handbook states that indirect contributions — including those made by individuals on behalf of another person — are ineligible.

“If the registered party receives an ineligible contribution and it has been deposited into the party’s bank account, the chief agent has to return the unused contribution to the contributor within 30 days of becoming aware that it is ineligible,” the manual explains.

“If that is not possible, the chief agent has to send a cheque for the amount of the ineligible contribution to Elections Canada, payable to the Receiver General for Canada.”

Since a one-year party membership costs $15, that means the party likely will have to cut a cheque for over $20,000 to the Receiver General — because it won’t be possible to return the money to the unwitting contributors themselves.

The party has linked the 1,351 fraudulent membership purchases to two IP addresses, but the party is dealing with the process behind closed doors despite some campaigns calling for a public reckoning.

The membership controversy began last Thursday when candidate Kevin O’Leary’s campaign put out a press release that alleged (without naming names) that “backroom organizers” were carrying out a vote-rigging scheme.

One anonymous source contacted several media outlets, including iPolitics, by email prior to O’Leary’s press release, accusing two of Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown’s organizers in Tamil and Sri Lankan communities, both of whom are publicly helping candidate Maxime Bernier’s campaign.

The scheme allegedly involved using Brown’s PC leadership campaign list to bulk buy memberships using pre-paid credit cards bought at gas stations and supermarkets, then using software to hide the IP addresses from which they were purchased with the cards. In April, the organizers would then visit the homes of these unwitting members and convert them into voters.

Bernier’s campaign initially responded to O’Leary’s charge by calling him a “loser” — and in turn accused an O’Leary organizer in the Sikh-Canadian community of illegally and hypocritically offering to pay for party memberships.

On Wednesday, The Hill Times reported that Bernier’s membership chair, Alex Nuttall, was accused of signing up phoney members in a 2010 Ontario Progressive Conservative nomination race, but was cleared of any wrongdoing by the provincial party.

In a characteristically inflammatory tweet issued the same day, Kellie Leitch’s campaign adviser Nick Kouvalis linked Nuttall — the Conservative MP for Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte — to the current fraudulent membership scandal.

Bean counters at @MaximeBernier HQ: 25,000 memberships – 23,000 prepaid memberships = OH SHIT! @AlexNuttallMP will know what to do. — Nick Kouvalis (@NickKouvalis) March 22, 2017

Earlier this week, Leitch’s candidate agent, Bob Dechert, also wrote a letter to David Filmon, the chief returning officer for the Conservative party, asking for an immediate inquiry.

“In our view, it is obvious that this fraudulent scheme of bulk membership purchases was designed to benefit one Leadership Candidate,” Dechert wrote, adding that the results of that inquiry should be made public.

In the event that a candidate or their staff or volunteers are determined to have been responsible, he added, the candidate should be invited to end their campaign or be removed from the ballot.

Leadership candidate Lisa Raitt echoed that, calling for the “expulsion of any candidate found to have broken the leadership rules”.

But lawyer Jack Siegel, a longtime Liberal who has served as the party’s constitutional and legal affairs co-chair and practices election and political law at Blaney McMurtry LLP in Toronto, said he doesn’t think anything more about the process will be made public moving forward.

“I’ve run leadership processes. Two as the lead person, and two more as a senior official. There’s no way as a party administrator I’m sharing the flipping IP addresses with campaigns who are going to turn this into public fodder. That’s just not responsible behaviour,” he said Friday.

“You’re going to get a lot more detail … out of a Liberal who loves to see the Conservatives twist in the wind than you’re going to get from Conservative (party administrators), whose primary responsibility is to run a credible leadership process while not embarrassing their party.”

Nor, he added, would or should Elections Canada say anything more.

“Elections Canada has to maintain a neutral perspective and not simply provide information they aren’t compelled to provide, which could prove embarrassing to a party. If it’s something that’s required to be on the public record, they have no choice. But otherwise, elections officials just don’t do that,” he said.

“It just creates bad blood.”