A BC Liberal leadership candidate says he called for an audit of party memberships ahead of the February 5 leadership vote after reviewing data that raised questions about new members.
Val Litwin said he sent a letter to the party last month outlining concerns after his campaign reviewed data that included people giving an address on their membership application in areas where there are no houses.
“When you see an address that’s on a forest service road that doesn’t actually have a house, a place of residence, that’s a flag,” Litwin said Thursday. “We are seeing it in the analysis of the data and the details of the membership itself.”
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Litwin did not release the letter he sent to the party, but said party officials have been in contact with his campaign about membership issues and he is hopeful the concerns can be resolved before next month’s vote. .
Litwin is one of seven candidates vying to replace former leader Andrew Wilkinson, who resigned after the October 2020 election in which Prime Minister John Horgan’s New Democrats were re-elected with a majority.
A statement from Roxanne Helme and Colin Hansen, co-chairs of the party’s elections organizing committee, said Thursday that 2,644 members “remain flagged for further follow-up to confirm their membership information before they are allowed to register to vote.”
The party has around 43,000 members.
“The party takes concerns around election integrity very seriously, our number one priority is ensuring a leadership election result our members can trust,” the statement said.
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Neither Hansen nor Helme were available for comment.
Litwin says the party must also be transparent about the results of the audit.
“We have to get to the bottom of it,” Litwin said. “I am confident that we can get through this, but as a candidate who has been casting a vision for change, and for the BC Liberals to become a modern and relevant party, it starts with our behavior.”
A statement earlier this week from Helme and Hansen says the criteria used to identify memberships for review are based on several objective measures, including missing email addresses and phone numbers, credit cards that don’t match the name or the member’s address and excessive use of a single Internet Protocol address.
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Representatives for the leadership campaigns of candidates Michael Lee and Gavin Dew confirmed Thursday that they also sent a joint membership letter to the party this month. The letter said that a preliminary analysis “suggests that a significant portion of the membership should be flagged for audit in the 33 to 50 percent range.”
Dew said in a statement Thursday that if he is elected leader, he will introduce legislation to have Elections BC, the independent office that runs provincial elections, administer all political party leadership contests.
“That should be a boring technical process, but this is the third consecutive race for the leadership of BC Liberal in which it has been a major source of tension,” he said.
The 2011 and 2018 Liberal leadership contests included concerns about voting problems.
The other leadership candidates, Renee Merrifield, Ellis Ross, Stan Sipos and Kevin Falcon, were not immediately available for comment.
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