Jean calls for UCP leadership review to be in-person

After the bad taste of the 2017 leadership race voting irregularities, Brian Jean the second

place candidate in that race is calling for the upcoming spring leadership review to be conducted by an in-person vote rather than a Digital/online vote.

Jean, who recently won the nomination for the UCP for Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche by-election, said in a facebook post this past week that UCP have not done enough to ensure fraudulent memberships, "The UCP has not created sufficient controls to prevent the sale and digital voting of fraudulent memberships."

The vocal critic of current UCP leader Jason Kenney pointed to his own nomination race in 2021 to why the UCP need to switch to in-person voting, "In my recent nomination contest there was a distinct last minute wave of 200+ persons who "bought" memberships in the final two days. About half of these members had fake email addresses. When we emailed them, the email bounced. The email addresses looked genuine - some variation of the person's name at a gmail, yahoo, or hotmail address - they just didn't go anywhere.

"The UCP's systems don't check to see if the email or phone number attached to a "member" is actually theirs. That means that voting credentials sent to an email or phone number can end up in someone else's control, without the "members" consent. This makes any form of digital voting untrustworthy."

Jean is calling for multiple in-person ballot locations across the province to be set up, but if that can't happen the UCP must assure the integrity of the process, "Ideally, I would want the review vote to happen in-person at multiple locations throughout Alberta, but if we can't have that, the UCP board must take all steps to assure the integrity of the process by not allowing any form of voting that can be marred by identity fraud. "

The UCP are expected to conduct a leadership review of Premier Jason Kenney in April of this year in Red Deer.