Good morning! Wendy Cox here this morning filling in for a vacationing Mark Iype.

Voters in Alberta’s Battle River-Crowfoot riding have their first chance at advance voting today in a by-election that could return Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre to the House of Commons.

Mr. Poilievre is widely expected to win. He’s explicitly running in the seat far, far away from the Ottawa-area riding he had held for two decades but lost to the Liberals in the last election. Battle River-Crowfoot is considered one of the safest Conservative seats in the country.

Damien Kurek won the seat with 82 per cent of the vote in April and had held it since 2019, but gave it up for Mr. Poilievre.

Rather than marking an X, voters will have to write a name in a blank on their ballot, a first in a Canadian election. (Elections Canada assures misspelled names will still be accepted as a vote.)

Some 214 candidates have signed up to run, many of whom don’t live in Alberta, much less the riding, and most of them running with no intent to win on Aug. 18.

The protest candidates are part of the Longest Ballot Committee, a group calling for changes to Canada’s electoral system.

This is the fourth time Alex Banks has run in an election – the first was last year in the Toronto-St. Paul’s federal by-election. He told Globe reporter Emily Haws his participating is a fun form of protest for a cause he believes in.

“I thought it was a low-impact, high-visibility way” to protest in favour of electoral reform, he said. “You’re not shutting down streets. You’re not interfering in people’s daily lives, but you’re clearly making a point.”

The group contends that politicians face a conflict of interest in making election laws, and that those decisions should instead be made by an independent, non-partisan body such as a citizens’ assembly.

The committee itself does not have a demand for any particular set of election rules. Rather, it’s a demand that politicians recuse themselves from the process.

The ballot paper resulting from so many candidates would be so long as to gum up the process for counting ballots.

The Longest Ballot Committee was once in league with Canada’s long-standing satire party the Rhinoceros Party, which once had a campaign promise to repeal the law of gravity. (Columnist Campbell Clark described the Rhinos as the “merry pranksters of Canadian politics.”)

In 2019, the committee said it wanted to set a Guinness Book of World Record for the longest ballot ever, but it fell far short: The Guinness Book lists the record at 1,187 candidates, who ran in the Prague municipal elections in 1994.

But Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault is not amused.

He has been outspoken about long ballots, which he says create confusion for voters and challenges in counting and processing results.

Perrault has called for the federal government to bring in penalties for individuals who are responsible for stacking ballots with independent candidates.

The Globe’s editorial board is even less amused, writing that the group “is weaponizing the good intentions underpinning electoral rules, which are meant to give candidates a relatively easy path to get on the ballot.”

To get on a ballot, candidates need the signatures of at least 100 voters – only 50 in some ridings – and have an official agent to file paperwork. Living in the riding isn’t mandatory, a good thing for Poilievre.

The Globe notes the committee has been able to round up so many candidates in part by having voters sign multiple nomination papers. The group’s spokesperson, Tomas Szuchewycz, was listed as the official agent for 199 nominations as of Monday. Candidates don’t have to do the work of convincing their fellow Canadians; the committee does it for them with a copy-and-paste system.

But the voices of actual independent candidates get drowned out, the editorial board argues.

Independent candidate Bonnie Critchley pleaded with the group in May in a Facebook post not to bring its disruptive campaign to Battle River-Crowfoot.

“Your actions make it impossible for electors to be able to find anyone who isn’t attached to a party,” she wrote in an open letter on Facebook. “You are further pushing us into a party system.”

The editorial board concludes that far from the fun Mr. Banks appears to be having, the Longest Ballot Committee is conducting “electoral sabotage.”

This is Alberta newsletter written by Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.