Friday, March 9, 2012

Conservative campaign worker tweeted robocall alert two days before vote

Suggestive but not dispositive:

http://bit.ly/xElnoQ

OTTAWA — On the day "Pierre Poutine" activated the burner cellphone used to launch his robocall blitz on voters in Guelph, Ont., a young Conservative campaign worker sent out a message on Twitter warning of "voter suppression calls" aimed at his party.

Andrew Prescott, deputy campaign manager to Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke, tweeted on April 30, "Anti-#CPC voter suppression phone calls currently underway in Guelph, suspecting #LPC #elxn41" — referencing the Twitter shorthand for the Liberal Party of Canada and the 41st general election.

Prescott, a self-described cellphone expert, followed up a few minutes later with another tweet claiming that these phone calls were "using spoofed Caller-ID of Burke campaign. I 'wonder' who it could be . . ."

Later, Prescott tweeted about these alleged calls again, saying "#LPC internal polling must be BAD, considering the dirty voter suppression calls underway in Guelph . . ."

He also sent a public Twitter message to CBC blogger Kady O'Malley, speculating the Liberals' internal polling "must be REALLY BAD, voter suppression calls in Guelph AND Halton . . . anywhere else?"

But it was not until two days later, on election day, that reports of fraudulent Elections Canada calls began to flood in, prompting the agency to send out a news release warning electors to ignore the fake calls.

More than 100 voters misled by the fake robocalls showed up at the Quebec Street Mall polling station, where some of them ripped up their voter IDs in anger.

The Ottawa Citizen could find no media reports from Guelph referring to spoofed phone calls or voter suppression calls aimed at Burke supporters before election day.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So the Conservative campaign worker discovers illegal Conservative-vote-suppressing phone calls. Then the Conservative candidate loses the election.

So did he then report this to Elections Canada, or for some reason decided not to?

Eric said...

The whole thing is a ridiculous mess. The biggest scandal of all, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's taken Elections Canada this long to take any kind of substantive investigative action. I don't know how we can possibly trust the current system going forward as a democratic nation.