Elections Canada Finally Investigates Election Fraud Allegations — And So Does Sixth Estate
Some new life was breathed into the investigation of election fraud in 2011 today when Elections Canada investigators filed court documents requesting that various phone companies reveal call records of complainants in more than 50 ridings across the country, which may be used to identify the source of a number of harassment and misdirection calls made during the election — some sending voters to the wrong polling location, others just pestering them, allegedly on behalf of the Liberal Party, which denies the calls.
This is getting more than a little ridiculous. The investigation lurches on, zombie-like, never really active but never really dying. One day, we’re told, there will be a final report. Maybe. Only it might not be public. It might or might not lead to prosecutions, or compliance agreements. If it does lead to a compliance agreement, Elections Canada may or may not decide to withhold that agreement from the public until after the next election, in order to shield the government from the consequences of its misdeeds — something it did last election, for instance, to protect the illegal overspending habits of the campaign of Government House Leader Peter Van Loan.
Here’s the part that’s truly silly, though: it’s November 2012. They’re filing for the call records now? They got some of these complaints almost 18 months ago now. The rest of the complaints filtered in during the spring. What the hell took so long? One of the things that emerged from the “Pierre Poutine” investigation in Guelph is that Elections Canada took so long to investigate that many critical records had already been deleted. And that investigation starting filing warrants a year ago now. It’s safe to say any investigation of a May 2011 election that starts searching for documents in November 2012 is going to have a bit of a rough time. Once again this country is stung by Elections Canada’s incompetence.
I’m putting up something I should have put up months ago, which for the moment I’ll call Project Poutine: a record of misdeeds by both the government and the opposition parties. Real misdeeds, I mean, not just a word spoken out of turn. It’s quite a length list, as you can see. Most of the items on the list aren’t actual links yet, because it’s going to take me some time to put everything together. And it will only grow. But somewhere there ought to be a record, I think, of the various shenanigans our political parties are allowed to get up to in what appears to be a basically lawless political sphere.
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Alison
it’s November 2012. They’re filing for the call records now?
Not quite. EC isn’t filing for the call records now; the production orders, call records, and interviews with complainants from May to October are only just being tabled in federal court now.
The CBC story you link to is a little confusing on that point.
Sixth Estate
The production order was filed in October of 2012.
Alison
Yes but at least this time the EC interviews with Shaw customers who received misdirection calls are concluded, Shaw confirmed in May that they had the call detail records and did a successful test run of 36 in August, and the 30 day production order limit to deliver the total call detail data to EC is now up.
When the rest of us will get to hear about it is of course another matter …
Saskboy
My new project is going to be called Project Hair Pull, while I remove mine over the investigators’ incompetence and lack of urgency.
Sixth Estate
Alison — Yeah, I understand that they’ve been working sort of since May.
But it emerged last week that investigators were aware something fishy was going on as of election day — not just in Guelph, but with respect to these other calls as well. It seems that rather than start a serious investigation at that point, and ask people to come forward if they had been the subject of voter suppression calls, they more or less sat on their hands until the story went public in February.
Saskboy
Yep, they didn’t think they’d have to deal with it publicly until it became a national scandal instead of a series of local news scandals, like a local Conservative campaign admitting in Dec. ’11 that they were behind a phone number people complained had provided misleading info.
Saskboy
http://www.therecord.com/news/local/article/641986–crank-calls-remain-a-fixture-on-political-scene
Saskboy
The message when the *69 number was called back http://media.mmgdailies.topscms.com/audio/c5/95/69d1693e42e6bb0c1edc4a86ed58.mp3
Saskboy
It will be very interesting if this news story
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/11/19/pol-elections-canada-emails-show-complaints-robocalls.html
can be linked with the complaint made by the Liberals in Kitchener-Conestoga.
http://www.therecord.com/news/local/article/642172–phone-number-behind-misleading-call-disconnected
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Alison
Saskboy : They admitted it but called it “an error” because the local riding ass. had mistakenly thought the call recipients were in their riding. EC’s responded that due to GOTV, “inaccuracies can occur” and declined to pursue it .
Sixth Estate : Agreed. And given that we now know how alarmed EC officials were about ‘irregularities’ in the 3 days leading up to the vote, I don’t know why an EC spokesy wasn’t on the top of CBC News every night those last 3 days warning people about it.
Well I do know actually – it’s because EC is more inclined to have a quiet little chat with offenders after the fact..
Alison
Sorry, Saskboy, your last comment wasn’t up yet when I posted mine.
Saskboy
A quick, depressing reminder how little EC cares about law enforcement, that they make the ‘tough’ decision to not ask for prosecution so a judge can decide if the law was broken. http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/editorials/elections-canada-cops-out-167154005.html
Saskboy
I noticed tonight that Hawdur-emails appeared in the news in February ’12 in Postmedia, and in November ’12 with CBC as “new” emails. Were the emails included in the batch that Postmedia got, and if not, why not? I’d assume the request was worded differently, or Maher and McGregor decided to focus on different emails, but the one using the word “scam” seems pretty powerful to leave out an explicit mention.
Also, if CBC made the request in Feburary, and got the emails in November, that’s simply not fast enough. I know those reading here don’t buy into the “Harper Government” propaganda that they are open and transparent.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/11/19/pol-elections-canada-emails-show-complaints-robocalls.html
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/23/stephen-harper-denies-tories-knew-about-illegal-election-robocalls-linked-to-party/
Sixth Estate
Alison — The difficulty is, even in the best-case scenario, I think even the Conservatives would really have no idea who they sent to the right polling stations and who they sent to the wrong ones. From what’s emerged in public, it seems that the Conservatives retained RMG to make call-outs giving polling station information based on GOTV lists that were often obsolete and outdated. Therefore, even assuming the Conservatives DIDN’T feed false contact information to some other contractor, their legitimate operations at RMG would have resulted in at least some erroneous call-outs, and even the Conservatives wouldn’t be able to tell you which ones.
Sixth Estate
All that said, the content in the callouts cited in the new Elections Canada warrant I don’t think fits with what we’ve been told about RMG thus far. RMG presumably would be the place the party sent a GOTV script which was then read out to voters in good faith by RMG. Presumably if there was a “scam” operation also ongoing, it would be done separately with a different contractor under a different name, much the way the so-called “Pierre Poutine” misused Racknine’s services.