An Alberta country music singer wants more from Elections Alberta after a letter was leaked by former workers who raised concern about how the Water, Not Coal petition was validated.
“It sort of verified that what we had heard from our lawyers was consistent with what they were saying,” said Lund.
The letter, which Great West Media obtained a copy of, was addressed to the provincial Standing Committee on Legislative Offices and was signed by five former Elections Alberta workers who noted various procedures and policies were changed throughout the validation process.
“This included the criteria used for determining whether individual signature lines were valid. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the project was in jeopardy of meeting the time limit requirements as set by legislation, as the validation processes kept changing,” wrote the former employees.
The letter goes on to say the former employers felt disrespected and believed they were being treated unprofessionally.
“We had concerns whether the process was being completed in a fair, equitable, and consistent manner with the many daily and sometimes hourly changes to the processes,” said the letter.
For Lund, who has been campaigning against coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rockies for years, this is a major concern.
“Instead of verifying, they were making them regurgitated,” said Lund. “And then (Elections Alberta) said they put out a social media post, and on their website, they were going to use caller ID. And in a number of cases, they didn’t because we have screenshots proving they didn’t. And so basically people are getting calls from a random toll-free number and being asked to provide their personal details in the wake of a huge data breach,” Lund said.
Lund’s petition called for an end to coal mining in the Rocky Mountains and garnered more than 196,000 signatures.
However, Elections Alberta concluded the petition had only 172,088 signatures, just short of the 177,000-plus signatures required for verification.
“Every time we got a fail, we lost 550 signatures. We ended up losing 24,000 signatures in that process. And we just feel a lot of the criteria that was much more stringent than for every Canada,” said Lund.
To Lund, the biggest problem is the lack of concern the government caucus demonstrated on this issue.
“That’s my biggest issue,” said Lund.
In response, the government caucus said the committee didn’t take into account the letter because the staffing issues were the responsibility of Elections Alberta.
For its part, Elections Alberta said it followed the processes in place, and that the changes were procedural or due to identified inefficiencies. The non-partisan agency overseeing Alberta’s elections also noted it will not be commenting further on Lund’s petition, as it is subject to a judicial review.
Out of all of this, Lund said it’s vital that people are able to trust Elections Alberta.
“Elections Alberta can be completely trusted by the public, and if we need to fix some things, we should fix some things,” he said.
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David Boles, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, St. Albert Gazette.