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Canada's Conservatives Misled Voters With Massive Robocall Operation
choongiri writes "Elections Canada has just traced thousands of illegal phone calls made during the 2011 federal election to a company that worked for the Conservative Party across the country. The automated VOIP 'robocalls' appeared to be designed to stop non-Conservative voters from casting ballots in key ridings by falsely telling voters that the location of their polling stations had changed, causing them to go to the wrong location on election day. This news casts serious doubt on the legitimacy of Canada's Government. The Conservatives narrowly won their 'majority' by 6,201 votes in 14 ridings, with only 39% of the popular vote." For those as unfamiliar with the term "riding" in this context as I was, here's Wikipedia's explanation.
I'm not Canadian so my analysis may not be totally the same as it is in America but consider:
Why do people bother doing this kind of thing? Are these people who are rigging the phone systems or (allegedly) tampering with the voting machines getting richer? Are they, themselves the ones running for office (or working closely with those who are?)
By and large no. In our countries (unlike say India where rigging an election can bring you a great deal of personal advancement) they likely won't gain "materially" in a big way. So why do they risk fines and significant jail time (as well as probably being labelled as a felon) for ths kind of thing? It's only an election for Christ's sake!
Well that's exactly it, for (extremely?) religious people it IS for Christ's sake! I mean if you really, truly believe in God, there should be absolutely nothing, including strapping on a bomb vest and blowing up some infidels, that you shouldn't do for the good of God. (In fact, I must say, these Muslims seem to be the only religious people who take God seriously. Not that I'm encouraging you to.). So, tampering with the vote is literally nothing by comparison.
The only things that even come close to religion in motivating people are Family and Country. (I'm not a Bible expert but didn't God ask someone to kill his own kid? So religion is more powerful than Family). And Country is powerful enough as is; just ask Oliver North.
The smoke has yet to clear on this, so putting this at the feet of the Conservative Party of Canada is premature and possibly libellous.
In all likelihood, this is either the work of a rogue agent or even a well-intentioned mistake. More than that, if a rogue agent it is possible that this agent is actually a supporter of one of the opposition parties, either playing a deeper game, or mistakenly including supporters of opposition parties when actually intending to encourage Conservative supporters not to vote. (How would this agent know, for example, who the supporters of a given party are? Votes are secret, after all.)
It is conceivable that this is simply a mistake. For example, suppose that there was some discussion between election officials during the pre-election period about an anticipated uptick in voter participation. It is possible that someone was commissioned to handle notifications, but was not included in a subsequent decision not to make any change. Admittedly, this is not a likely scenario, but until the facts are all in we simply do not know. My personal bet (you saw it here first!) is that this was a botched operation by some union activitists.
For those peeing themselves in their haste to cast blame, patience. On the face of it, it looks like the person behind this will be chased to ground. First, I think that this was paid for by a credit card. Second, according to reports, the audio was professionally produced, meaning that voice actors were used -- voice actors who will likely come forward.