Calgary West MP Rob Anders is directly asking Conservative members in his riding to protect him from a nomination challenge for the Tory seat, saying it would harm both his party and his riding.

Anders sent a letter to members earlier this month discouraging them from sending in a party ballot that would contest his position in the riding. “I hope you will agree that now is not the time to open up another long, bitter, drawn-out nomination battle,” Anders wrote. “It will not be good for the Party or Calgary West.”

Donna Kennedy-Glans, the Calgary lawyer who wants to challenge Anders for the Tory nomination, says she’s hearing from frustrated party members who haven’t yet received their ballots and get no response when they call Conservative headquarters. “This kind of indifference and taking away people’s right to vote and right to choice is really, really offensive, and people are reacting to it,” she says. (Kennedy-Glans needs the support of two-thirds of party members in the riding to challenge Anders.)

“That’s what Nelson Mandela spent his whole life fighting for — the right to vote,” she adds, referring to the South African leader Anders famously branded a terrorist in 2001. “Isn’t that an irony?"

Don Plett, president of the Conservatives’ national council, says the party sent out 92,000 ballots countrywide and got 114 back because of wrong addresses. “So clearly, [with] the membership in Calgary West, the majority, if not all of them, have received ballots,” Plett says.

Plett says that because Anders paid for the letter with his own money, it’s “entirely appropriate.”