London PC member says party has done all it can to fix voting problems, as clock ticks towards deadline

The clock is ticking for members of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario to register themselves for voting in its leadership race.

The deadline is set for Thursday at 8 p.m., and was pushed back three times after complaints about voter registration problems. But efforts to remedy the issues haven’t been of any help to London’s Nathan Caranci, who suspects his letter from the party was sent to an older Ottawa address.

He’s one in as many as thousands of party members across the province who haven’t been able to cast a ballot.

“I made a phone call to the party, let them know I no longer lived at that address, and would need a new paper or some other way to vote,” Caranci explained.

“At that time, they informed me, ‘Too bad, if you cannot find what we mailed you to your old address in Ottawa, you can’t vote.'”

Caranci is frustrated there’s nothing he can do to vote in the leadership race, but he says it’s a “product of the process.”

No one expected to go through the leadership vote, he said.

And even despite the voter registration issues, the party has seen a record number of ballots cast so far.

“I just hope that all candidates, win or lose, don’t call into question the legitimacy of the outcome. I think everybody is doing their best right now, to get as many people to vote as possible. The best thing that could happen, is for the losers of this process to come out and support the winner.”

Requests have been made to push the deadlines back even further, but Rob Anderson, the president of the London-West PC Riding Association, says it’d be tough.

“Due to the party’s constitution, and the rules and bylaws, they do have to stick to some sort of date,” he said.

“The party still has to keep things organized, right, to the best of their ability.”

Anderson says many of the members in his riding received late voter packages in the mail early this week.

On 980 CFPL’s The Andrew Lawton show on Monday, Doug Ford said 100,000 members hadn’t received their verification PINs in the mail.

On Wednesday evening, Hartley Lefton, the chairman of the leadership organizing committee, said they’d already reached “record turnout” with 44,189 ballots cast by 9:30 p.m.

Caranci appears regularly on 980 CFPL roundtables, hosted by Craig Needles.