Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is running for re-election in a riding that has dozens of independent candidates on the ballot, a co-ordinated effort by a group protesting Canada’s electoral system.

As of Monday afternoon, 74 candidates were registered at Elections Canada with Tomas Szuchewycz listed as their official agent. While the vast majority are listed as independents, Sébastien CoRhino is with the Rhinoceros Party.

Elections Canada said the complete list of confirmed candidates in the Ottawa-area riding of Carleton will be available Wednesday.

Mr. Szuchewycz, the spokesperson for the Longest Ballot Committee that is organizing the protest, said its goal is to point out the conflict of interest of having politicians in charge of election rules. The committee argues there should be a permanent, non-partisan body to handle changes to the electoral system.

The committee’s main objective is to protest the first-past-the-post electoral system, in which candidates can be elected with less than 50 per cent of the vote. Despite his promises as prime minister, Justin Trudeau did not take action to pursue electoral reform.

The committee is targeting Mr. Poilievre’s high-profile riding to get attention, Mr. Szuchewycz said. It had planned to stage a similar protest in Nepean, where Liberal Leader Mark Carney is seeking a seat, but it ran out of time, he added.

“I don’t believe that the electoral system represents me well as a voter, and I don’t think I’m served well by having these people with the obvious conflict of interest in charge of deciding what happens with our voting system,” he said in an interview. “Voters should have a say in it.”

He said he hopes a few of the candidates get invited to local debates to draw attention to the issue of electoral reform.

When asked why they didn’t target the ridings of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh or Green Party Co-Leader Elizabeth May, Mr. Szuchewycz said the group only has so many resources.

Acadia University professor Alex Marland, who is the Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership, said he doubts the protest will make a major difference to the election result.

“Somebody who is motivated to go out to, you know, get in a car or go walk and get to a polling station isn’t making up their mind once they get there,” he said, noting that the chances of someone going to vote for a party and then last-minute deciding to vote for a different candidate is “very low.”

Hypothetically, he said, the protest could take away votes from a party not likely to win, with people deciding instead to vote for a Longest Ballot-affiliated candidate as a form of political protest. Still, it is unlikely to change the final result, he said.

The group has also been active in recent votes such as in June’s Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election, which had a total of 84 candidates. It took eight hours for Elections Canada to count the ballots, which were nearly a metre long. There were also 91 total candidates in the LaSalle-Émard-Verdun by-election, which took place in September.

In response to those protests, Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault proposed Canada penalize people who stack ballots with independent candidates as a form of protest.

Mr. Perrault previously told The Globe and Mail that long ballots create confusion for voters and challenges in counting and processing results. While candidates must obtain 100 signatures to run – or 50 in rural areas – he said some voters are signing for several candidates, leading to the long ballots.

Mr. Szuchewycz called the proposed sanctions “ridiculous,” saying they would not stop the committee.

Prof. Marland said the protest brings attention to the fact that this electoral issue needs to be fixed. While he trusts Elections Canada’s proposal, he says the law could also be changed so that every candidate needs to have their own official agent.

The entire situation is frustrating, he said, because he believes Canada needs more independents running and less power going to political parties. An independent candidate not affiliated with the Longest Ballot Committee would have a much harder time in this riding, he said.

Other candidates running in Carleton include Bruce Fanjoy for the Liberals, Beth Prokaska for the New Democrats and Mark Watson for the Greens.