The Longest Ballot Vulnerability

The Longest Ballot Committee has struck again, this time in the unnecessary Battle River-Crowfoot by-election prompted by Pierre Poilievre’s defeat in Carleton. The protest movement wants electoral law taken out of the hands of parliamentarians and is creating unwieldy ballots to make their point. But what point are they making? Yet again, the reformers are going after the wrong target and hurting more than they’re helping.

The ‘citizens assembly’ they want already exists. It’s called ‘Parliament’ and consists of people elected by the citizens from every corner of the country to make decisions about how we govern ourselves and address our common problems and interests, enacted in the form of legislation. If the issue that they want to solve is excessive party control of Parliament, they’re going about it in about as wrong a way as they possibly can. If it isn’t, they’re going to end up giving more control, not less, to political parties, through this protest movement.

The committee does not, from what I can find, have a website of its own or a manifesto. It is more a form of electoral guerrilla warfare. In the technical world, this type of attack on our electoral system would be referred to as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

They did, however, submit a letter to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs in response to Bill C-65 oozing with sarcasm and calling for the creation of an independent body to govern election law. The text of the letter is available through the website of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada.

Bill C-65 died on the order paper with the dissolution of Parliament for this spring’s election, but it called for a number of fairly minor changes to electoral law, including the reduction of the number of signatures a candidate requires from 100 to 75.

In testimony, Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perreault said:

As you know, a protest movement seeks to significantly increase the number of candidates on ballots. The movement started at the 44th general election and continued in four subsequent by‑elections. I brought the ballot from the fall election held in the constituency of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun. The metre‑long ballot features 91 names in two columns. Just imagine the difficulties faced by a voter who has any form of disability or literacy barrier or who can't easily handle this type of ballot. Any further increase in the number of candidates will require me to reduce the font size on the ballot, further compounding the task of voters who have literacy barriers or disabilities.

I support the proposal in the bill to reduce the number of signatures required for nominations from 100 to 75. However, the requirement for signatures mustn't be rendered meaningless. In the case of the longest ballot initiative, we saw nomination papers from different candidates featuring largely identical signatures. This indicates that voters who sign the nomination papers aren't supporting the nomination of a particular candidate, but rather the idea of having as many candidates as possible, whomever they may be. These voters are fulfilling the objectives of the longest ballot committee.

I wrote to Minister LeBlanc in September. I asked the government to consider an amendment to the bill, which I included in the table shared with the committee. This amendment would ensure that voters are limited to signing the nomination paper in support of only one candidate. However, the key lies in ensuring that the nomination paper isn't rejected or challenged simply because a voter also signed someone else's paper. The candidate doesn't know what other signatures the voter may have signed. We're talking about a prohibition, not a condition for the validity of the signature.

The issue is simple. By making ballots as big as they can, they are removing accessibility as noted by Perreault, they are encouraging voters to quickly look for the name they recognise in the sea of static, they are presenting candidates who do not have a sincere desire to serve, and they are further hindering the already nearly impossible task of getting genuine independent candidates elected to Parliament, as noted by independent Battle River-Crowfoot candidate Bonne Critchley in her May open letter to the Longest Ballot Committee.

It is bad enough that political parties place so-called paper candidates in ridings they do not believe they have a chance of winning. At least each only provides one per riding and, as the NDP Orange Wave in Quebec showed in 2011, those paper candidates do have a possibility of winning and serving effectively. The Longest Ballot Committee in running some 200 candidates against each other does not send a message of democratic choice, but rather openly mocks it.

The premise of the Longest Ballot Committee is that Parliament should not control election law, using the electoral boundaries commission as the model. Two of the three members of the boundaries commission for each province, though, are appointed by the Speaker of the House, and the proposed changes are subject to revision at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs and approval of the Members. Parliament does in fact retain control of the process.

However, while today it is the Longest Ballot Committee performing a denial of service attack against our elections, in the future it could be any group with any objective. While I do not agree with Pierre Poilievre that the committee is a “scam” per se, I do agree that it exposes a vulnerability that needs to be addressed. It may be a legal means of protest, but it is not appropriate and creates a vulnerability in our democratic structure that cannot be left unresolved.

There is nothing whatsoever to stop a political party — or a foreign power — from using the same process to place 1000 candidates with the same name as their principal adversary on the ballot, or, for example, from an ultra-religious group using this means of protest to force their adherents to not have to, say, pay taxes. The vulnerability exposed by the committee needs to be addressed before it becomes more problematic than it already is.

There used to be a requirement for candidates on federal ballots to make a monetary deposit of $1000, which would be refunded if they obtained 15% of support in the election. The purpose of this since its introduction over 150 years ago was to ensure that candidates were sincere and not frivolous; like the requirement for signatures itself, it created a basic barrier to entry intended to avoid exactly what we have today. The deposit however was struck down in 2017 in Szuchewycz v. Canada as being against section 3 of the Charter and the government did not appeal.

Elections need to be open to everyone who is ready and willing to serve. I have long stated that if you do not agree with the options, you have an obligation to run. That sentiment took me all the way to my own seat in the House. There does, however, need to be some kind of limitation, which cannot be based on owning property or of being of a particular gender or race, all of which have been the case in this country in the past.

In the absence of a deposit, which in my view is a low bar to entry and does not place an unreasonable financial burden on the candidate themselves as those funds may be fundraised, there need to be other solutions. The Chief Electoral Officer’s suggestion that citizens be prohibited from signing more than one nomination paper is one option. Signing multiple papers would not prevent the candidate from being nominated, but would subject the voter themselves to prosecution in the same way as they would if they were found to have voted more than once. Rather than further lowering the requirement from 100 to 75 signatures, it should be raised to 200. Someone who is not willing to collect 200 signatures from the citizens of their riding cannot reasonably be expected to do the work of a Member of Parliament; this is a low bar indeed, and creates a hard limit of a 1/200 ratio limit on candidates to voters.

Another option would be to limit candidates to being residents of the ridings in which they run. This to me is self-explanatory and would be popular with the public, but one might find that a very significant portion of current MPs — and Pierre Poilievre in Battle River—Crowfoot — would suddenly find themselves ineligible to run in their current ridings.

Whatever solution is ultimately found, the Longest Ballot Committee’s only positive contribution to the electoral process is in exposing a vulnerability in our electoral system that needs to be addressed — by the Citizens Assembly responsible for our laws that we call Parliament.