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Five of the seven leadership campaign teams wrote to the party on Jan. 5 alleging they found memberships that appear to contravene the rules.

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Top B.C. Liberal party brass insist their internal auditing process will address concerns raised in a scathing letter signed last week by a number of leadership hopefuls warning that up to half of new party memberships may be fraudulent and could cause catastrophic reputational damage to the party if not properly investigated.

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Five of the seven Liberal leadership campaign teams wrote to the party on Jan. 5 alleging they found membership documents that appear to contravene the rules, and they suggested that the partys current audit process is not robust enough to properly investigate their claims. A separate but similar letter was sent by a sixth leadership campaign team.

The campaigns said they found some new members whose addresses were recorded as being in ridings where they do not live. In other instances, some addresses were not residences, but businesses and in one case, a forest service road. They reported that follow-up phone calls found that some people listed as new members had no idea they had been signed up, while others had never heard of the B.C. Liberal party.

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We are collectively concerned about the potential for voter fraud, the current audit process, and the risk of catastrophic reputational damage to the party, party staff, (the leadership committee), the executive and all of us if this race is perceived as anything less than free and fair, said the letter to the Liberal Election Organizing Committee.

Postmedia made several requests for interviews with the party executive and its election organizing committee chairs, Colin Hansen and Roxanne Helme.

Instead, the partys director of communications, David Wasyluk, provided a written statement expressing confidence in the audit process.

This system identified some members who need additional follow up to meet our audit standards. Our registration and voting systems are designed to ensure that members who do not satisfy our audit standards will not be able to cast ballots, it said.

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The statement did not answer whether it will audit 20,000 memberships as requested by the campaign teams. It also did not confirm how many memberships are under review.

Wasyluk said the party does not rely on telephone alone to confirm the identity and addresses of its members.

The party uses multiple methods to confirm member information including but not limited to direct communication via phone and email. This includes cross referencing information from publicly available sources.

Kevin Falcons leadership team is the only one that did not sign the letter or express concerns over potentially fraudulent memberships.

Falcon, a former minister under both former premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark, is considered by some to be the frontrunner in the leadership race. Last month, his campaign manager, Kareem Allam, tweeted the Falcon campaign signed up the most new party members.

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On Monday, Allam told Postmedia he is satisfied with assurances by party brass that it has not found abuse in the membership process.

We have been assured by the party that the things those other campaigns have alleged, have not occurred, he said. We have seen individual errors, like typos or the wrong postal codes. Weve seen a case where a community that was flooded, a lot of members are in the same hotel and have the same address, so it may raise a red flag, but these are not fraudulent memberships.

The issue of residency could play a decisive role in who will become the next Liberal leader.

Under the partys voting rules, each electoral district is awarded 100 points, which are divided among the candidates according to how many votes they get in each electoral district. That means it takes fewer votes to win in districts where there are fewer Liberal memberships, so campaign teams may target new memberships in districts where they need fewer votes to win.

The letters from the campaign teams for Michael Lee, Gavin Dew, Renee Merrifield, Ellis Ross, Stan Sipos, and Val Litwin cast doubt on how many new members live in the ridings where they are signed up and whether the partys audit system is able to catch that.

B.C. Liberals are set to vote for a new leader on Feb. 5, but the campaign teams have asked that registration for the vote be delayed until the concerns can be adequately addressed and mitigated.

The party has not answered questions about any possible delays to the registration process.

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B.C. Liberal party insists its vetting process will catch fraudulent memberships - Vancouver Sun