Braid: Agency that can't count straight will soon face millions of referendum votes

Two senior officials at Elections Alberta were fired because they didn’t like what was happening to Corb Lund’s anti-coal petition.

Lund released an explosive letter the ex-employees sent to the legislative offices committee, a UCP-dominated body that oversees Elections Alberta.

This is now a scandal that casts doubt on the integrity of the Oct. 19 vote on 10 referendum questions, including a crucial two-parter on separatism.

The officials said the rules on verifying signatures for Lund’s petition changed at the last minute.

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Their letter reported: “On the day the Water Not Coal petition arrived, we were told the templates that we had been using for previous recalls and petitions were no longer going to be used.”

Chaos ensued. “Over the next couple of weeks, the process went from bad to worse.”

Changes “included the criteria used for determining whether individual signature lines were valid.”

Lund has complained for months that Elections Alberta phone calls to check signatures were deeply flawed.

Pollster Marc Henry, for one, has said the number of calls — 384 — was ridiculously inadequate for judging a huge volume of signatures.

Lund says that every time somebody refused to answer a question, often fearing the call was bogus, the Water Not Coal petition was docked 550 signatures.

Elections Alberta determined that Water Not Coal needed 177,732 signatures to succeed.

Initially, the number of “valid” signatures totalled 196,088. Good news for the anti-coal people.