Elections Alberta says a petition by musician and activist Corb Lund to stop coal mining in the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains was unsuccessful. The agency posted the results Friday morning. Elections Act law required Lund’s team to collect 177,732 verified and validated signatures in order to be considered successful. Although Elections Alberta found 196,088 signatures were collected, only 172,088 were verified after a random statistical sampling method. The process, Elections Alberta explained, is in two phases: signatures are verified, but whole petition sheets and technical details are also validated. Some signatures were rejected during verification because people who signed the petition weren’t able or were unwilling to confirm the information they gave on the sheet, or didn’t provide a valid contact, meaning they couldn’t be reached at all for verification. Other signatures were rejected during validation, meaning there were certain technical flaws on petition sheets including incomplete information, invalid dates, double signing and incomplete or improperly completed canvassers signature witness declarations. Lund’s petition was also the first to be scrutinized since a voters’ info data leak involving a group called the Centurion Project. Elections Alberta says it checked the petition for seeded names – i.e. random and unique names that only appeared on the Republican Party of Alberta’s private list of electors for security, which the Centurion leak was traced back to. Elections Alberta says it found no seeded names in Lund’s petition. In a statement Friday afternoon, Lund expressed “grave concerns about ... the fairness of the process itself.” He said he submitted more than 205,000 signatures and was “shocked” to find out Elections Alberta had rejected “roughly 35,000.” “This has been an unreasonable and opaque process from the beginning, and despite diligently following every rule, we are left with more questions than answers,” he said. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith had already announced that the petition would not be included in the upcoming Alberta referendum, even if it had been declared successful by Elections Alberta. Elections Alberta confirmed the same or a similar petition question could be resubmitted, as each citizen initiative petition is treated independently. A notice of intent to apply for a new citizen initiative petition can be made at any time except in the 12-month period immediately before a fixed-date general election, during a provincial election, or in the 12-month period immediatley after the most recent general election. Lund, who was on tour in the U.S. on Friday, thanked his fellow canvassers and said he would announce his next steps shortly.
