Barbara Patrocinio

Reporter

As allegations mount over the Ontario Liberals’ chaotic Scarborough Southwest nomination contest, the man tasked with overseeing ballot integrity for Nate Erskine-Smith says what unfolded inside the voting hall looked less like a controlled democratic process and more like “a madhouse.”

But supporters of winning candidate Ahsanul Hafiz are rejecting those allegations, dismissing the appeal as a politically motivated attempt by Erskine-Smith to avoid responsibility for losing a closely fought race.

Here’s a dive into what both sides are saying to back up their versions of what happened last Saturday.

, Andreas Katsouris, who was Erskine-Smith’s chief scrutinizer during Saturday’s nomination vote, described a process he says steadily deteriorated throughout the day before collapsing into full disorder by mid-afternoon.

“There was no secrecy of the vote maintained whatsoever,” Katsouris said. “People started walking from the lines to the boxes, or they were walking around with their ballots. They had already filled them out. They were showing them to people.”

The Scarborough Southwest nomination has exploded into controversy after Erskine-Smith lost to Ahsanul Hafiz by a margin of 19 votes. Erskine-Smith has since filed an appeal challenging the legitimacy of the result, arguing the process was compromised by irregularities significant enough to overturn the outcome.

Throughout the aftermath of the vote, some Hafiz supporters have suggested Erskine-Smith’s campaign accepted the process by allegedly signing the official tally sheet after ballots were counted. Katsouris denied that.

“We didn’t know how many people had voted,” he said. “There was no way for me to know.”

“If I signed anything, it would be to say, ‘Yes, this was the count,’” he said. “Does that mean that we’re signing off on all the crap that happened before that? Of course not.”

“The count out of the box showed Hafiz winning by 19 votes. That’s true. No question,” he said.

But he added that campaigns were never given the information necessary to independently verify whether the number of ballots actually matched the number of eligible voters processed throughout the day.

Katsouris said the final voter lists were only updated after the fact, leaving scrutineers unable to reconcile the totals during the actual counting process.

The appeal hinges heavily on a discrepancy Katsouris says remains unexplained: party records indicate 1,489 people voted, while 1,523 ballots were counted.

“There are 34 ballots that the party can’t explain,” Katsouris said. “Their data says there were 1,489 people who voted. Their data says there were 1,523 ballots cast. Where do these votes come from?”

“In a race decided by 19 votes,” he added, “that would be enough on its own to overturn this result in any normal process.”

A senior source in the Hafiz campaign disagrees.

“They’ve done the math wrong, and second of all, they’ve misexplained the issue,” the Hafiz source said. “They’re making it sound like there are extra ballots issued. That’s not what happens.”

According to the campaign source, the discrepancy was due to human error in tracking voters electronically.

“When a voter goes to the front of the line, their ID gets checked against the list so they get issued a ballot,” the source said. “The deputy returning officer is supposed to punch in their number into the computer to mark them off as having voted.”

“There are 18 deputy returning officers issuing ballots. Sometimes people make mistakes. On average, the DRO has made two mistakes in a five-hour meeting.”

“The number of ballots issued and the number of ballots cast match,” the source added. “The only thing that didn’t match was the number of voters who were scratched off the list as having voted.”

The source also accused Erskine-Smith of damaging the Ontario Liberal Party at a politically sensitive moment.

Katsouris, on the other hand, said concerns existed before voting even began. He said caucus staff were involved in Hafiz’s campaign, something that Erskine-Smith himself had said previously, as well as concerns about memberships removed from the voter list.

Nate Erskine-Smith downplays tensions as Scarborough Southwest race nears

Still, he said he did not immediately realize the process itself was fundamentally compromised.

“It takes a while for you to see patterns and inconsistencies,” he said. “My concerns sort of built throughout the day.”

But he said several procedural failures emerged almost immediately.

“At the very beginning of any election, the election administrator is supposed to seal the ballots. They did that. Count the ballots, they didn’t do that. Distribute the ballots to the tables and record how many ballots are given out to each table… they didn’t do that either.”

Katsouris said the nomination’s organizational structure quickly became overwhelmed as hundreds of voters requiring secondary identification review flooded the credential stations.

According to figures provided by the party, he said 465 people were processed through secondary credential checks. “ Now, that number is gonna be lower than the real number because some people were just turned away in the first station,” he said.

“It would be north of 500, obviously,” he said.

As the day progressed, Katsouris said officials struggled to consistently apply identification standards. Questions arose over whether voters could use banking apps, PDF bank statements, leases, or refugee claimant documents to verify eligibility.

Refugee claimants are allowed to vote under Ontario Liberal rules, he noted, but some of the documents being presented were not on the party’s approved identification list.

The situation, he said, deteriorated sharply around 2:30 p.m., when organizers opened the doors and allowed voters waiting outside to crowd into the voting room itself.

“That’s when I thought, ‘Okay, this is a madhouse,’” Katsouris said.

He described voters entering through exit areas, groups crowding voting screens together, and widespread “family voting,” where relatives or groups of friends appeared to complete ballots together.

“Sometimes just a husband and wife, sometimes a patriarch with his children, sometimes a whole bunch of friends crowded together,” he said.

Katsouris confirmed he personally took the photograph which is in Erskine-Smith’s appeal, showing an individual appearing to photograph a completed ballot inside the voting area, despite explicit instructions prohibiting photography in the room.

“We were told explicitly no photographs in the voting room,” he said. “I just got fed up and pulled out my phone and took that photo.”

“That looks awfully like vote buying to me,” he said, while stressing he was not directly accusing Hafiz himself of wrongdoing. “I hope the party will investigate that.”

“If that’s true,” he continued, “then the party needs to ask itself what kind of candidates it wants to represent.”

Katsouris said that many of the failures stemmed from a “systemic collapse” rather than deliberate misconduct by frontline election staff.

“I feel a little bad for them,” he said of returning officers and deputy returning officers. “I think they were set up to fail here.”

Also on what happened before the actual vote: In recent weeks, screenshots and archived Facebook activity tied to Hafiz’s account began circulating within Liberal circles, including reposted graphic material dating from 10 years ago. It was a link to a post to what appeared to be a pornographic material depicting incest and sexual violence.

Some organizers and party members raised concerns internally about whether the posts should have disqualified Hafiz during the party’s Greenlight vetting process.

“Hafiz was vetted by the Greenlight Committee,” the source said. “They were well aware of the allegations.”

But there are also questions around the party’s vetting structure emerging in recent days after internal party emails from Simon Tunstall to the party Executive Council reviewed by 

 said that Ontario Liberal nominations commissioner Kathryn McGrath was initially expected to oversee vetting largely on her own.

A source in the Executive Council said this was the last update they got regarding the process, dating March 28th.

 on whether she did the vetting alone, Kathryn said she had a team to help her, but refused to share how big it was or the name of any of its participants.

Executive Council said to not have been informed of any changes regardingg the process.

The Hafiz source said committee membership is traditionally kept confidential and argued there was nothing unusual about the party declining to release names publicly.

Another point of contention during the nomination was the distribution of “sample ballots” by Hafiz supporters outside the voting area.

The mock ballots, printed in Bangladeshi, marked a “1” beside Ahsanul Hafiz’s name, instructing voters how to cast their ballot.

A translation done with online resources said it reads as follows: "Sample ballot. Please mark your ballot exactly like this. If you make a mistake, you can get a new ballot from the help desk. If you have any questions, ask a volunteer for help."

A source in Hafiz's team said that it is standard practice to show voters how to vote, clearly marked as a sample ballot, and it is used in dozens of nomination meetings.

“If there’s a weak link in the chain of our democratic process, you saw it on Saturday,” Katsouris said.

He also tied the chaos to longstanding concerns about party membership rules that allow non-citizens, including temporary residents and international students, to vote in Ontario party nominations. The Ontario Liberal caucus has previously defended the rules and said that there are no concerns regarding foreign interference.

Scarborough Southwest nomination draws thousands as Ontario Liberals prepare for byelection

Katsouris noted that while nobody is alleging foreign interference in this specific contest, the broader issue has not been adequately addressed by political parties.

“To not attend to this issue is amateurish at best,” he said. “We have way too much confidence in our democracy than we should.”

He contrasted the nomination process with the stricter standards Canadians are accustomed to seeing in federal and provincial elections.

“You’ve seen what a proper Canadian election ought to look like,” he told 

 during the interview. “There was no control in there.”

The Ontario Liberal Party has not publicly commented in detail on the appeal process or whether it believes the nomination result could ultimately be overturned.

The Hafiz campaign said it believes the appeal lacks substance and is unlikely to succeed.

“A typical appeal would read like a legal brief. This is not a legal brief,” the source said. “It’s a press release wearing a trench coat.”

Katsouris said he does not know what remedies are available under party bylaws, especially given the upcoming by-election. But he argued that, at minimum, the unexplained ballots make it impossible to uphold the result without further review.

“There’s no way to sustain an inexplicable 34-vote addition to the number of ballots when somebody challenges,” he said.

Pollster Quito Maggi disagrees. "The math just isn’t mathing over at team Nate Erskine-Smith," Quitto wrote on social media. "Total ballots counted on first count 1501, total names struck from the list 1489 That’s a difference of 12, not 34," he said.

Erskine-Smith has already stated publicly that he will not run again if the nomination is re-held.

The party accepted the appeal, and now arbitration is expected to wrap up in the next few days given the sense of urgency, a source inside the party says, although it can technically last weeks.

"There have only been two occasions that I can think of where a meeting has been rerun, and the last one I can remember was Albina Guarnieri, 25 years ago," said a long-time Liberal organizer.

A bitter dispute has erupted inside the Ontario Liberals after Nate Erskine-Smith challenged the results of the Scarborough Southwest nomination contest. Competing claims of procedural failures, ballot discrepancies and political damage are at the centre of the Ontario Liberals’ Scarborough Southwest nomination fight.

“This is a madhouse”: Erskine-Smith's chief scrutinizer describes breakdown inside Scarborough Southwest Liberal vote

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