COLUMN: Think Again – Longest Ballot Committee is playing games with democracy

The Battle River-Crowfoot byelection will take place on Aug. 18. Voters in this Alberta constituency will have more than 100 candidates to choose from.

No, I didn’t accidentally add a zero to that number. As of last week, 102 candidates had registered to run in that seat, and the total will likely go up.

Is this because of a surge of interest in running for public office among residents in that area? Hardly. Rather, most of the names on the ballot will be people who have never stepped foot in Battle River-Crowfoot. They are part of a group called the Longest Ballot Committee (LBC). This group doesn’t like the current first-the-post electoral system where MPs are elected based on getting the most votes in a constituency.

To convey their dissatisfaction with the current electoral system, the LBC tries to get as many names on individual ballots as possible so that voting becomes unwieldy. They typically target high-profile ridings where party leaders run or individual byelections such as the upcoming Battle River-Crowfoot byelection.

As a result, voters are stuck having to wade through metre-long ballots with hundreds of names on them. This obviously slows down the voting process itself, as well as the tallying of results.

In the 2023 Winnipeg South Centre federal byelection, the LBC got 48 candidate names on the ballot. They upped their game in the 2024 Toronto-St. Paul’s byelection with 84 candidate names, and then 91 candidate names in the Carleton riding during the 2025 election. Now they have set a target of 200 candidate names in Battle River-Crowfoot.

So, what does all of this accomplish? Absolutely nothing, other than annoying voters and delaying the release of election results. No government is going to suddenly change the entire electoral system just because some nuisance group is messing around with the candidate registration process.

Ironically, the candidates hurt most by LBC’s antics are not the high-profile party leaders, since motivated voters will look for those names on the ballot, but the legitimate independent candidates who are just trying to get noticed. That’s because most voters have trouble distinguishing them from the LBC candidates on the ballot.

The antics of the LBC has gotten the attention of Elections Canada. Last year, Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault suggested several changes to nomination rules to make it harder for LBC to interfere with elections. Notably, Perrault suggested allowing voters to sign only one candidate’s nomination papers.

Currently, prospective MPs need to get at least 100 eligible voters in a constituency to sign their nomination papers. What the LBC does is get the same 100 voters to sign nomination papers for multiple candidates. When you consider that each constituency has an average of 100,000 residents, it’s not hard to see how the current rules make it easy for the LBC to flood ballots with joke candidates.

The LBC often has the same person acting as the official agent for each of their candidates. To curb this practice, Perrault suggested that a person be allowed to serve as an official agent for only one candidate in an election.

These are both eminently reasonable suggestions. Any serious candidate for MP should have no problem finding their own official agent, nor should it be difficult for them to get at least 100 people to sign their nomination papers. What these changes would do is make it harder for bad faith actors like the LBC to interfere with elections.

If you don’t like Canada’s electoral system, run for office and change things if you get elected. Don’t engage in juvenile antics like what we see from the LBC.

Michael Zwaagstra is a high school teacher and deputy mayor of Steinbach. He can be reached at mzwaagstra@shaw.ca.