Do ridiculously long ballots make a mockery of our elections?

An operation called the Longest Ballot Committee has targeted Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre's by-election in the ultra-safe Conservative riding of Battle River-Crowfoot in Alberta after he managed to lose his old Carleton, Ontario, seat in the last election.

There are now some 216 candidate names on the Battle River-Crowfoot electoral ballot, 201 of which are spurious candidates generated by the Longest Ballot Committee, so they have had to change the polling rules to allow people to write in their choice of MP, rather than try and find them in a metre-long list of hundreds of candidates.

To be clear, the Longest Ballot Committee is not targeting Poilievre himself - they are not a partisan organization - but rather the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system. However, Poilievre does seem be taking it rather personally, and has spoken out vehemently against it, even though it is very unlikely to lead to him losing the by-election in this case. He calls the protest "a scam", "unfair" and "unjust" - none of which is actually true, I don't think, certainly no more so than a recently-elected MP giving up his seat and inviting in a man from the the other side of the country to take it instead.  Poilievre is calling for the system to be changed to disallow this kind of protest.

The Liberals too are making noises to the effect that maybe such protests should not be allowed. And some of the real independent candidates in Battle River-Crowfoot are also, understandably, crying foul. Interestingly, though, a recent Angus Reid poll shows that support for banning such protests is not that strong (47% to 34%) nationwide.

Do I object to it? I would prefer some kind of proportional representation system to our current FPTP system (which is essentially what the Longest Ballot Committee is agitating for), so it's not a bad thing that the Committee is - quite successfully - drawing attention to it. But it does make a bit of a mockery of the whole electoral system, which is already under stress and suffering from low voter turn-out.

I think on balance that I would prefer to see the candidate system tightened up a bit, so that a candidate would need more than 100 signatures to be able to stand, and so that the same 100 (or whatever number) signatures can't be used for multiple candidates, which is essentially what the Longest Ballot Committee relies on.

But, by the same token, we do also need to do something about the distorting FPTP system we have, which tends to yield strong party majorities, or near-majorities, from relatively small popular vote majorities, or even minorities.