An example of a ballot for the riding of Carleton, showing the names of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal Party of Canada candidate Bruce Fanjoy, is seen at the Elections Canada Distribution Centre on the day of the federal election in Ottawa on April 28, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

OTTAWA - A group trying to make a case for electoral reform by creating very long ballots is declaring victory in this week's election — even as critics accuse it of indulging in stunts that undermine democracy.

"It's been a success," said Mark Moutter, one of dozens of protest candidates who ran in the Ottawa riding of Carleton.

"I've never seen people looking more optimistically at electoral reform, ever."

The Longest Ballot Committee started targeting ridings in 2021 by nominating multiple people — some of them living in other provinces — in order to ensure extremely large ballots.

The committee's stated goal is to spark a national conversation about electoral reform. It says it wants to see a citizens' assembly put in charge of crafting a new electoral system, and argues that political parties are reluctant to make the government more representative of a diverse electorate.

In Monday's general election, the committee targeted the Carleton riding that had been held by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, contributing 85 of the 91 candidates on the ballot.

Elections Canada printed ballots that were nearly 97 centimetres long, with two columns of names. It also started an early count of advance ballots to cut down on delays in the riding — which saw a staggering voter turnout of nearly 82 per cent.

The agency said before the election that these enormous ballots can take three times as long to count and require more ballot boxes than conventional ballots.

"Counting a ballot like the one we saw in Carleton does take longer," wrote Elections Canada spokesman Matthew McKenna.

The agency did not say Wednesday what kind of impact the long ballots had on the counting process in the riding, which continued into the early hours of Tuesday. The three main parties' electoral district associations did not provide any of their scrutineers for an interview.

Longest Ballot spokesman Tomas Szuchewycz said the committee also intended to nominate multiple candidates in the neighbouring riding where Liberal Leader Mark Carney sought office. He said they "ran out of time" because it wasn't clear at first who would win the Liberal leadership or where they would run.

"This one-of-a-kind campaign has been a whole lot of fun and we want to thank again all of the volunteers, candidates, and supporters who made this year's longest ballot possible," Szuchewycz wrote in a media statement, arguing the committee's efforts have boosted interest in electoral reform.

Not everyone thinks the committee's efforts are having a positive effect, however.

Carleton University political scientist Jon Pammett, a proponent of electoral reform, said he doubts the long ballots are building support for the cause.

"It's kind of a nuisance. It's an annoyance," he said. "You can get people's attention that way. But how you get from there to discussions of electoral reform is the kind of puzzling part."

Pammett said he expects Elections Canada will propose measures to make it harder to stack ballots with so many candidates.

In 2017, the Trudeau government opted to not challenge an Alberta court ruling that said it was unconstitutional to require those running for a federal seat to first present a deposit — $1,000 at the time. The plaintiff in the case was Szuchewycz's brother Kieran.

The Longest Ballot Committee ran a campaign in a Montreal byelection last September under the direction of the leader of the satirical Rhinoceros Party. The ballot for LaSalle—Émard—Verdun had 91 names on it — 79 of them associated with the Longest Ballot Committee.

Last June, the results of a byelection in Toronto—St. Paul’s were held up for hours after 84 candidates signed up to run, including 77 linked to the Longest Ballot Committee.

Canada's elections chief took aim at the committee last November. Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault told a House of Commons committee that extremely long ballots delay the count and suggested that people should face penalties for signing multiple nomination papers.

Perrault said that the long ballots also pose problems for some people with disabilities and might require smaller font sizes, "further compounding accessibility challenges."

The large ballot in Monday's vote got noticed on social media and inspired conspiracy theories claiming that the effort had been funded by Poilievre's opponents.

The committee said it faced similar criticism from Liberal partisans when it ran multiple candidates in the 2023 Winnipeg South Centre byelection.

Moutter's group said it's trying to raise the profile of electoral reform because the project has seen no real progress in Parliament. He noted that ridings where counting took the longest were not targeted by his group.

If anything, Moutter argued, the lack of ranked ballots in general elections is what makes tight races hard to call. "The current system — which we're fighting back against — is what's prolonging the elections right now," he said.

Pammett took the opposite view, arguing that the voting systems electoral reform advocates consider more democratic tend to lead to much longer vote counts.

He said it's possible to change electoral systems through referendums, such as New Zealand's 1993 plebiscite.

But Pammett, who served on the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform in 2006, said it takes years of concerted effort to build up sufficient public interest to even hold a referendum — like the British Columbia plebiscite in 2018 that recorded just 39 per cent support for a switch to proportional representation.

The public often needs a prominent example of the an electoral system failure — such as a popular party winning zero seats — to build up a critical mass of opinion in favour of electoral reform, he said.

Moutter said he ran in last fall's Montreal byelection — the first federal vote in which he was old enough to cast a ballot — after hearing about the Longest Ballot Committee's advocacy elsewhere.

"The ability to get involved for the first time ever, and actually getting to talk to people about electoral reform, was what pushed me," he said. "It's just something that I'm really passionate about, and I hope to improve democracy that way."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 30, 2025.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2025