Robocalls and Voter identification - Department of the Bleeding Obivous

My Facebook and Twitter feeds are filled with variants of this CBC story noting that the people robocalled on election day as part of the effort to misdirect voters to phony polling stations were people who had previously received calls from Conservative campaigns in which they identified themselves as non-Conservative voters. Most of the people who have reposted this story have been expressing shock.

I'm not shocked at all. I'm appalled that the information was used this way, but I figured that was how those lists were established in the first place. As I've noted earlier, I was one of the Guelph voters who received the false polling station robocall (and which I duly complained about to Elections Canada.) Earlier in the campaign, I had received calls from virtually every party, and yes, I told the Conservative caller that I wouldn't be supporting Marty Burke.

Political parties do this during elections. They call all the voters that they have phone numbers for, and identify them as definite yes, definite no, and swing voters. Those lists help them decide where to allocate resources for follow-up contact during the campaign. They are also the lists used by party volunteers on election day to manage their get-out-the-vote campaign - keeping track at polls of who has already voted or not, and then sending that information back to campaign offices to provide the basis for late-afternoon get-out-and-vote phone calls, and providing offers of rides to the polling stations to identified supportive voters who have not yet voted.

It's not a leap of logic to figure out that the culprit in this effort at voter suppression used this particular type of internal campaign information to target the fradulent robocalls- a "stop-the-opposition-vote" campaign, if you will. I'm astonished that no journalist had connected the dots so explicitly yet.

Here's the next story, for the naive among you. Some Conservative party member is going to come forward and say that they too got a robocall, and that they had told a Liberal or NDP campaign caller that they weren't going to vote for them.

A proper investigation should rely primarilly on the formal complaints to Elections Canada from election day. Anything that emerges later is likely going to be spin and misdirection.

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Robocalls - Guelph at the centre of the maelstrom

Well, it's not quite how and why I'd like to see my current hometown in the news, but if it helps expose corruption from the 2011 election, I won't complain. It would appear that the automated phone calls here in Guelph on election day 2011 were what triggered the main Elections Canada investigation that has recently become national news. As one of the people who called Elections Canada to report the phony calls on election day, and who initiated a call trace with Rogers, I'm pleased to see that my actions and those of fellow Guelph voters have actually led to concrete action. I'm also quite relieved that despite those phone calls, my local MP still comfortably won re-election to the Liberal benches.

Alas, I very much doubt, despite the optimistic predictions of diehard partisans, that this scandal will topple the government. I figure that a few scapegoats will be tossed under the bus, and that a prolonged court case will probably lead to fines and charges against lesser party officials. But with a majority government ensconced in both the House of Commons and the Senate, plus what will likely be plausible deniability of top party brass, I don't think that Harper's government is in any immediate danger of falling. The question becomes whether this electoral sleaze will still resonate with the electorate come 2015. I'm not counting on it, but it certainly is something to hope for and work to keep in the public eye as long as possible.

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Election-day shenanigans in Guelph

Like a good citizen, I headed out bright and early this morning to my local polling station to vote this morning. There was no line-up, but a steady flow of people in and out to the various booths. My partner reported the array of Conservative signs that were lying on the grass in front of the station (although not standing up) to the local officer, who had them removed before we had left the station. And then the interesting part of this story begins.

I returned home to find a message from an automated dialer on my voice mail telling me that my polling station had been switched from the one printed on the card I had received from Elections Canada, directing me to the Old Quebec Street mall. Clearly, this was a hoax. According to my caller ID, the call came from a 450 area code, and told me to call a 1-800 number if I had questions (the final four digits of which matched the number on my caller ID - not the 1-800 number on Elections Canada's website). I've reported the hoax call to Elections Canada, and initiated a call trace on the call. Hopefully that phone number will be shut down, and the perpetrator will not succeed in suppressing the vote.

This has been another ugly, ugly election here in Guelph. No reports of cut brake lines like last time, thank god, but enough nasty efforts at vote suppression and unpleasant campaign strategies that I'll be really happy when all of this is safely over.

Get out and vote everyone - and if you're not sure where to vote, check the address on your polling card or the Elections Canada website.

3:44 ETA: For more information about how this story is unfolding in Guelph, see this article in the Guelph Mercury. It appears that the local returning officer is arranging transportation for anyone who shows up at the hoax locations trying to vote.

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