Canadian Electoral Reform Organization Causes 128 Candidates to File for House of Commons Special Election, as a Protest

Posted on by July 21, 2025

Canada is holding a special election on August 18 to fill a vacancy in the House of Commons, in the Battle River-Crowfoot district in Alberta. Canadian ballot access is easy. Candidates for House of Commons need 100 signatures and a filing fee of $1,000. The Longest Ballot Committee, a group that favors proportional representation and/or ranked choice voting, has caused 128 candidates to file for the special election, as a protest against the status quo electoral system.

Here is the list of candidates. The filing deadline is July 28 so the list may grow between now and then.

Fortunately for voters, the list of candidates is in alphabetical order. When California held its special gubernatorial election in 2003, there were 135 candidates and they were not in alphabetical order.

The protest idea may cause the Canadian ballot access law to become more difficult. See this story, which says that Conservative Party leader wants to increase the petition from 100 signatures to 1,000 signatures, and also to provide that a voter may sign for only one candidate.

Comments

Canadian Electoral Reform Organization Causes 128 Candidates to File for House of Commons Special Election, as a Protest — 16 Comments

  3. Talk about backfiring, the Canadian Liberal Party are almost certain to take a page out of the “Democratic” Party and drastically up the ballot access laws, not to mention this is going to make reform efforts more difficult here when both ruling parties use this to justify the current harsh ballot access laws. I support Ranked Choice and Proportional Representation, but that committee are a bunch of short sighted idiots.

  8. An open write-in only ballot cannot be overcrowded with candidates’ names because no names are printed on the ballot, only space for the voter to control ballot content by writing-in the candidate name for each office on the ballot.
    Requiring the voter to use block letters, OCR can digitize the data accurately. The use of a write-in only ballot means no justification for candidate filings in advance, no candidate fees, no signature petitions to demonstrate a “modicum of support” months prior to actual election, no deadlines except election day.
    Of course, the duopoly claims simplicity is chaos.

  11. This is a great, timely, and effective protest against ballot crowding, voter confusion, and ridiculously easy ballot access.

  12. I love it when ppl take our “Wikipedia” woke Pedo joke site seriously.

  13. The standing count solves the problems pointed out by D. Frank Robinson as well as the growing percentage, soon to be overwhelming majority, of young folks who do don’t learn their ABCs or how to cast spells (spelling).

    We are still in the relatively early years of the first century of the first postliterate millennium, but postliteracy will grow by leaps and bounds, with the percentage of the population able to interpret these squiggles, much less make sense of their combinations, will be in the very low single digits if even above 1% within a century at most.

  14. There’s no need for replacement lists. The winning party should simply replace officeholders at will, with or without a vacancy and with or without their permission, until the following year’s election.

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