Michael Ignatieff may be leading the pack in the Liberal leadership race, but with three serious rivals nipping at his heels this weekend, the finale promises to be a nailbiter.

Results from October's "Super Weekend" show Ignatieff is in no shape to win it all on the first ballot.

Top contenders are vying feverishly for the support from delegates and the other leadership campaigns for the Nov. 28 - Dec. 3 Liberal Convention in Montreal, where the successor to Paul Martin will be crowned.

Martin triggered the leadership race when he announced on election day (Jan. 23) that he would not lead the party into the next one.

Nine months later, four candidates emerged from the Delegate Election Meeting (DEM) on the weekend of Sept. 29-Oct. 1, each with a realistic shot of winning the crown.

UPDATED: The chart below shows Michael Ignatieff well out in front as of Nov. 24 with Bob Rae, Gerard Kennedy and Stephane Dion clumped together in second place.

Candidate	Per cent	Number
Michael Ignatieff	29.3	1,377
Bob Rae	20.1	943
Gerard Kennedy	17.5	820
Stephane Dion	16	753
Ken Dryden	5.1	238
Joe Volpe	4.8	226
Scott Brison	3.9	181
Martha Hall Findlay	1	46
Undeclared	2.4	112

With none of the leadership hopefuls gathering numbers near the numbers required to win,  CTV.ca explains the process behind how the next leader will be chosen, and why this race will be a nailbiter to the very end.

What does a candidate need to win?

A candidate needs the support of 50 per cent plus one of delegates by the time it's all over on Dec. 2.

While the DEM results show some early trends, the first-ballot winner at the Convention is far from guaranteed to win the leadership.

With so many candidates in the mix, pundits say it will likely take several ballots before a winner emerges.

What is the process?

Delegates began registering the morning of Tuesday, Nov. 28. A number of meetings and policy workshops were held Wednesday, considered the first real day of the convention.

In these workshops, a number of resolutions will be debated. Only three of them will move on to a plenary session; party delegates will then vote the next day on whether to make them official party policy.

The first ballot happens on Friday, Dec. 1. Delegates must vote for the candidate they supported at the DEM (unless they were elected as an independent delegate).

If no candidate wins a majority (50% + 1) on the first ballot, the candidate finishing last is dropped from the ballot, and another vote is taken.

After the first ballot, delegates can vote for whoever they wish.

This process of successive balloting continues until one candidate wins a majority of the votes.

The first-ballot results are expected to be announced late Friday, or after midnight Saturday. The race then kicks into high gear on the convention floor at the Palais de Congres on Saturday morning. 

How does the race look regionally?

Ignatieff emerged from Super Weekend voting as the top pick in four provinces and one territory. He's tied with Kennedy for first in Alberta.

While Ignatieff's support in B.C. was weak, he managed to grab two key provinces: Ontario and Quebec.

The current second-place Rae did well in B.C., according to unofficial results, but he placed a disappointing third in Ontario and Quebec.

Kennedy placed second, ahead of Rae, in vote-rich Ontario. His strong showing there and in Alberta can make this former Ontario cabinet minister a kingmaker.

Dion didn't manage to win in his home province of Quebec, but he still finished a strong second. He placed third in Alberta, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and B.C..

Delegate breakdown by province/territory, as outlined on the Liberal.ca website:

Prov.	1st	2nd	3rd
Alberta	Ignatieff 27.3% (106)	Kennedy 27.3% (106)	Dion 19.1% (74)
B.C.	Rae 25.9% (147)	Kennedy 22.7% (129)	Dion 17.8% (101)
Man.	Rae 37.6% (89)	Ignatieff 19.4% (46)	Dryden 16.9% (40)
N.B.	Ignatieff 37.3% (50)	Rae 15.7% (21)	Dion 15.7% (21)
N.L.	Rae 37.1% (36)	Ignatieff 30.9% (30)	Dryden 12.4% (12)
N.W.T.	Not available
N.S.	Brison 41.1% (67)	Ignatieff 39.9% (65)	Dion 9.8% (16)
Nunavut	Kennedy 33.3% (1)	Undeclared 66.7% (2)
Ont.	Ignatieff 30% (448)	Kennedy 26.2% (392)	Rae 16.7% (250)
P.E.I.	Rae 43.5% (27)	Ignatieff 21% (13)	Kennedy 21% (13)
Quebec	Ignatieff 39% (375)	Dion 29% (279)	Rae 24.7% (237)
Sask.	Ignatieff 36.1% (78)	Rae 21.3% (46)	Kennedy 17.6% (38)
Yukon	Ignatieff 70% (7)	Rae 10% (1)	Kennedy 10% (1)

 

What is the strategy?

The DEM results suggest how the first-ballot results will look on Dec. 1.

Typically after that is when the backroom wheeling and dealing begins, with candidates trying to woo delegates and other campaigns for support on subsequent ballots.

But everyone knows it will take several ballots to decide this race. So the courting process began long ago and will likely continue right through to the week of the convention.

"Everybody is now searching for that second-ballot support," George Young, former national director of the Liberal Party of Canada, told CTV Newsnet.

Because of this, playing nice, not getting the elbows up too high during the sprint to the finish, is a critical strategy.

"No one has anywhere near enough votes to win this on the first ballot, so in that sense, it is very different than past conventions of recent vintage in our party and, frankly, in all parties in this country," said Young.

Liberal strategist Don Moors said expect the twisting of arms to continue on the convention floor late into the night on Friday after the speeches, as it's sure to be an "exciting evening."

"It is going to be a convention for a leadership that is going to be decided on the convention floor," Moors told CTV. "There's going to be a lot of jockeying for position and horsetrading as we head into this early December period."

But it's not all about winning the hearts and minds of delegates.

There are also hundreds of ex-officio delegates who can vote for any candidate they wish.

Ex-officios?

There are about 850 ex-officios who will make up about one-fifth of the delegates. They are the party stalwarts -- senators, MPs, party officials, riding presidents -- who don't need to be elected to vote at the convention.

Reports suggest Ignatieff has a lot of ex-officio support behind him, and a regularly-updated list of ex-officio endorsements found on Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, confirms this.

(The Canadian Press asked each of the top four camps to review this list. The Rae, Kennedy and Dion camps reported back to CP, saying the list was pretty accurate and up to date.)

According to the list, Ignatieff so far has the support of 230 of ex-officios and Provincial and Territorial Association (PTA) delegates who have declared their intentions (1,097 have done so). Meanwhile, the support is distributed more evenly among his contenders: Dion has 129, Kennedy has 111, and Rae has 85 (as of Nov. 29).

But such an endorsement doesn't guarantee a vote. Unlike elected delegates, ex-officios can change their minds right up to the moment of truth.

Further, these numbers can skew dramatically, as some of the bottom-tier candidates could see their ex-officio support jump to any of the top four (According to the list, Ken Dryden has 45 ex officio support so far. Scott Brison has 35, Joe Volpe has seven and Martha Hall Findlay has three).

The list also shows 403 unaffiliated delegates, who can suddenly back one contender, and 49 neutral.

Any other unknowns?

Yes. While ex-officios generally tend to be pretty reliable in showing up at leadership conventions, it's not clear how many of the 4,300 elected delegates will be there.

For one, there's a $995 delegate fee to deal with -- and that doesn't include travel and accommodation.

Under current election financing laws for leadership campaigns, it's illegal to subsidize the costs of delegates to attend. So campaigns will have to rely on senior ex-officios to "sponsor" some of their elected junior delegates.

Why the rules?

Prof. Aaron Freeman says it's about accountability, clearing up irregularities around delegate selection, and adding safeguards to the voting process.

There haven't been any regulations governing party conventions in Canada, not in the Canada Elections Act, not anywhere, said Freeman, co-author of The Law of Government: The legal foundations of Canadian democracy, and a law professor at the University of Ottawa.

"The thinking here is very much an old-school thinking that says the parties are private entities, and they should be able to run their own show."

However, that free-for-all notion is slowly being chipped away.

"We've recognized that parties are the central players in our political system -- and quite often the people who are elected in a leadership convention process end up being immediately, or ultimately, the prime minister of the country," he said.

"So these are very important contests in an electoral system that have, historically, been largely unregulated."

Voting process

The candidates are under a proportional representation system, rather than a winner-take-all process used in past delegate conventions.

It's essentially a "runoff" system where candidates with the lowest votes are successively eliminated until a winner emerges.

While the Liberals are using an outright runoff system, the Conservatives have used what's called a Single Transferable Vote system.

Unlike Liberals, a Conservative delegate's second and even third picks are locked in on their ballot.

To explain further, Tory delegates rank their preferences on a ballot with three candidates.

If no one gets enough points to take the leadership on the first ballot, the candidate with the lowest number is eliminated.

The ballots that list the eliminated candidate's first choice will be counted again. And the voter's second choice will be counted.

According to the 2004 Tory leadership policy manual, this method ensures that no "deal-making" takes place.

Further, said Freeman: "It's more democratic in a sense. If you vote for a losing candidate you don't feel that your vote will necessarily be wasted. If your candidate loses, your vote automatically goes to someone else."

Why the difference?

Freeman describes it as a function of the way the Tories organized their convention -- with a very large number of Internet and mail-in ballots.

This makes things more challenging.

"You can't wait for people to mail in a second ballot -- it would be very complicated to do it over the Internet. So that was part of the reason the Tories use a transferable voting system for their conventions."

Ignatieff's campaign would seem to prefer the Tory way of doing it.

The Globe and Mail reported that Ignatieff's campaign asked the Liberal Party to hold onto the first ballots overnight on Friday, and count them Saturday morning.

Releasing the results Friday night would give his opponents the chance to strategize and come up with ways to mount an "anybody-but-Ignatieff" offence.