Has NDP Leadership Front-Runner Jagmeet Singh Already Won After Signing Up Massive Members

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Jagmeet Singh, a Member of the Ontario legislature, claimed to have signed up 47,000 members, more than his 3 rivals combined. When voting begins in less than three weeks, 124,620 members will be eligible to vote in the federal party’s leadership race. With 41,000 members in March, 83,000 new members were added to the party’s rolls before the eligibility cut-off on Aug. 17.

TORONTO – Is the federal NDP leadership already in front-runner Jagmeet Singh’s bag after his massive membership sign-up.

The party announced last week that it has tripled its membership during its leadership race thanks largely to Singh from Ontario, who claimed to have most of the new sign-ups.

Singh, a member of the Ontario legislature, needed to sign up thousands more members than his three rivals to make up for his apparent deficit among the party’s existing membership base, reported CBC News.

Figures released last week suggest he has done just that.

Not only has it put him into contention to win it all, it has made him a potential first-ballot victor. But how realistic is that possibility?

When voting begins in less than three weeks, 124,620 members will be eligible to vote in the federal party’s leadership race. With 41,000 members in March, 83,000 new members were added to the party’s rolls before the eligibility cut-off on Aug. 17.

Singh’s campaign says it signed up more than 47,000 of those new members, a claim that cannot be verified by the federal party but has been put into question by Charlie Angus’s campaign — a complaint that has also been put into doubt.

Jesse Brady, co-campaign manager for Angus, told the National Post that Singh’s claim did not add up, as their records showed 70,000 on the membership rolls in May, before Singh entered the race. If Singh had indeed signed up 47,000, that would leave just 7,000 members divided among the other campaigns, an unrealistically low number.

But the party says the membership list visible to all candidates would have only showed about 41,500 at the end of April and 53,000 in July — meaning that the remaining 71,000 members had yet to be signed up or were registered by one of the candidates. The latter memberships were not shared with other campaigns until the eligibility deadline had passed.

Multiple NDP sources considered Singh’s reported tally to be plausible and suggested that Angus’s team may have counted people whose memberships had lapsed. These members were included in contact lists provided to the campaigns earlier in the race.

That Singh raised more money than the other three candidates combined in the second quarter of 2017, despite launching his candidacy only halfway through the reporting period, adds credibility to his claim, reported CBC News.