CALGARY — The CEO of the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP) is calling for a legislative review of how Elections Alberta verifies signatures, arguing the current process risks rejecting legitimate petition supporters over minor discrepancies. Mitch Sylvestre, the official proponent of the Stay Free Alberta citizen initiative petition, has said that while his own petition exceeded the required signature threshold, the overall verification process revealed what he describes as “significant flaws” that should be addressed before any future citizen initiative campaigns occur.With Sylvestre’s petition, Elections Alberta initially counted 286,593 signatures — far over the threshold of 177,732 — and found that 279,337 were valid.However, Elections Alberta applied statistical sampling and verified only 222,597, showing how a small number of questionable decisions can exclude thousands of valid signatures.Sylvestre is now urging the Alberta Legislature to establish clearer rules governing how Elections Alberta validates petition signatures and conducts post-submission verification..He added that a lawyer who acted as the petition’s scrutineer during the verification process at Elections Alberta’s Edmonton warehouse repeatedly raised concerns with election officials throughout the review.According to Sylvestre, some electors who confirmed they signed the petition failed the verification process because they couldn’t recall specific details months after signing.These included the approximate date they signed, whether identification had been presented, or whether an apartment or unit number appeared on the petition.“Citizen initiatives are intended to empower ordinary Albertans, not test whether they can recite perfectly recorded details months later,” Sylvestre said in a statement.“Verification should determine whether the person contacted is the elector who signed. It should not invalidate a genuine signature, and statistically affect hundreds of others, because someone cannot remember a signing date or an apartment number. Elections Alberta's process was more stringent than the identity checks many banks use to protect sensitive financial information.”.Elections Alberta validates Stay Free Alberta's successful Alberta independence petition .Sylvestre said none of the discrepancies suggested fraudulent signatures or mistaken identity, and because the verification process relied on statistical sampling, each rejected signature in the sample represented more than 700 signatures in the overall petition, potentially affecting thousands of legitimate supporters.He is also alleging that Elections Alberta made errors during the review, including incomplete rejection records, inconsistent staff instructions, and that it had more than 40 signatures flagged as duplicates that were later “shown to be false positives.”“Electors were held to a far higher standard than Elections Alberta applied to itself, and the agency failed to clearly tell Albertans when verification would begin or how they would be contacted, leaving many hesitant to trust the calls,” Sylvestre said.Apart from calling for a legislative review, Sylvestre now says there should also be clear regulations for signature validation and verification, adoption of a "totality of the evidence" standard rather than requiring exact correspondence on every detail, better public notification before telephone verification begins, and greater transparency around the statistical sampling process and its effect on the final results.“Future participants deserve a process that is transparent and faithful to that purpose," Sylvestre said. "Electoral integrity and democratic participation are not competing objectives, and a properly designed process must protect both."
