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Canadian Government accused of voting fraud


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OK, since people vote with a secret ballot, how do they find out you are a Liberal voter? I never tell people who I vote for so how did the Conservatives find out that you are a Liberal voter?

This so called scandal does not make sense at all. It is a bogus scandal.

If they make the robo-calls randomly, they would catch some Conservative voters. But yet it is only Liberals who complain.

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I can't understand how it takes 9 months for a scandal like this to break. It's not like these are secret proceedings: the scandal involves thousands of calls made to the public geared towards getting them to go to the wrong location on election day. Why was this not a news story a day or two after the election?

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OK, since people vote with a secret ballot, how do they find out you are a Liberal voter? I never tell people who I vote for so how did the Conservatives find out that you are a Liberal voter?

This so called scandal does not make sense at all. It is a bogus scandal.

If they make the robo-calls randomly, they would catch some Conservative voters. But yet it is only Liberals who complain.

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There are surveys and polls. The Conservatives have people who call and ask if you will contribute to their campaign. If you say you are going to vote Liberal or NDP, they record it.

One lady in Mission was in the newspaper for just this reason. She said she got called multiple times by the Conservatives asking to donate money. She got annoyed after receiving multiple calls and said she was going to vote NDP. A few days later she got a call from the same number telling her the polling station had moved. She told the person they were wrong and it hadn't changed and the other person hung up immediately.

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Frank Graves poll: So where are we?

In the midst of scandal, a measure of sway

A measure of opinion during a swirl of controversy can reveal much about a government’s moral authority. So with robocalls, Vikileaks and allegations from all sides about orchestrated smear campaigns, there may be no time like the present to check in on vote intention.

Before we get to the scandal, let’s consider where we’re at:

  • Nearly a year after the election, Stephen Harper’s majority government is well short of its May 2 position and now tied within the margin of error of the leaderless and supposedly floundering NDP. Note that CPC support may well be understated since this poll covers 100 per cent of eligible voters — not just the 60 per cent who will actually show up to vote. Even still, with a two-point lead, it’s highly unlikely the CPC would retain its majority in the remote and hypothetical world of another election. Instead, it would be relegated to opposition with an NDP-led coalition.

  • The third-place Liberals have improved slightly since their disastrous performance last May.

  • The Greens are also up, though largely with younger voters who are less likely to vote.

  • The rebirth of the near-dead Bloc Québécois is significant.

The CPC is thriving in Alberta. We now see a huge divide between Alberta on high end of the favorability spectrum and Quebec on the low end. While the Conservatives continue to do well with seniors and males, older Canadians are coming around to the Liberals. The second-place NDP are doing quite well within the margin of error of the CPC. The party’s slide in Quebec with the resurgent Bloc is offset by its performance in British Columbia where it leads.

Next we considered how Canadians feel about the direction the country and its government are heading. Mirroring rising economic anxieties, confidence here continues to fall and is now on par with the historical low of October 2010.

Even more disconcerting for the government is the 15-point net deficit that has opened on disapproval of its direction — a shift that is pronounced in Quebec and among younger, more educated Canada. Albertans and foreign-born Canadians, however, are very happy.

Finally — let’s look at Bill C-30. Even in Conservative Canada, the current legislation has few fans. Fifteen per cent of Canadians support passing the legislation in its current form. And while the plurality are open to “significant changes” to the bill, those who would rather kill the bill outright outnumber those who support the current version by a wide margin. Opposition is particularly strong among NDP and Green supporters, but even Conservative supporters would prefer the bill be amended. Men and university graduates strongly oppose it. It’s worth noting that those under the age of 25 are somewhat more amenable than others to having their internet activities monitored.

With the frenzy over robo-calls overtaking the frenzy over Bill C-30, it remains to be seen how it will all play with a public that often suffers from collective ADHD.

Given the government’s weakened position and poor standing on basic directional indicators, it risks descending into areas that call its legitimacy into question. While Harper’s Conservatives retain their moral authority, our poll suggests they’d be wise to tread carefully since they do not have oodles of residual political capital at their disposal.

iPolitics_infographic-polldataNEW.jpgSlide06.jpgThis is na interactive image on the site.

http://www.ipolitics...easure-of-sway/

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Conservative MPs used top Republican firm during May election

Fourteen Conservative MPs signed on with a well-connected Republican company during last year’s election campaign, contrary to the party’s claims, the Star has learned.

On its website, Front Porch Strategies, a “voter contact and constituency outreach” firm based in Columbus, Ohio, boasts: “In May’s federal elections, Front Porch Strategies won all 14 of their races.”

Among their clients was Peterborough MP Dean Del Mastro who, on Thursday, led the charge in the Commons over the voter dirty tricks scandal, accusing Liberals and notably Eglinton—Lawrence MP Joe Volpe of paying over $25,000 to a calling company with offices in North Dakota.

Added Prime Minister Stephen Harper: “We’ve done some checking. We’ve only found that, in fact, it was the Liberal party that did source its phone calls from the United States.”

In an interview with the Star, Del Mastro backed down on the North Dakota allegation — for which he apologized to reporters — and said: “Nobody is saying there’s anything wrong with the use of U.S. firms.”

After a raucous week in Parliament, Elections Canada confirmed Friday morning that it has received 31,000 complaints from Canadians about misleading and harassing calls since Monday.

Del Mastro praised Front Porch and said the company was very effective in running teleforums — Internet or phone-powered focus groups — in his riding.

But one of his Front Porch events got messy. On March 23, 2011, the day after the budget, a teleforum involving over 5,000 households, turned nasty when several supposedly screened callers launched a “smear campaign” against then Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, according to Liberal candidate Betsy McGregor.

“It was billed as a forum to discuss the budget but it seemed to me like an exercise in voter identification — and that’s not right,” she said from Peterborough. “He would have been 100 per cent certain Harper was going to call the election in three days so it was for electioneering purposes.”

McGregor recalled one caller falsely claimed Ignatieff wasn’t even Canadian and accused former Liberal governments of sending Canadians into battle in Afghanistan without flak jackets.

“I would just ask why not use a Canadian company? I think the people of Peterborough would be really astonished to know how our MP had to import U.S. services to win our election.” she said.

It’s not clear whether Front Porch stuck to teleforum work or handled other types of voter outreach — such as robo-calling — for its 14 Conservative clients. According to Elections Canada expense returns, they also included: Northumberland MP Rick Norlock, Rick Dykstra from St. Catharines, Brant’s Phil McColeman, Dean Allison from Niagara West—Glanbrook and Parm Gill from Brampton-Springdale.

The company’s website notes it has worked for the Conservative caucus as well as MPs.

PJ Wenzel, a partner in the firm, didn’t return Star phone calls. There’s an excerpt on his voicemail from former U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall speech,” from the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall in 1988. He urged then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “open this gate.”

Veteran political operative Jim Ross, a former Dykstra staffer hired as a consultant for Canadian operations by Front Porch, said the company doesn’t release information on clients or the type of work done. Over the past year, Front Porch also hired Erin Wall, a former communications adviser to Treasury Board President Tony Clement, as an associate.

Front Porch has worked for the top echelons of the Republican Party, including George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, Mitt Romney during his bid for the 2008 nomination and the Republican National Committee. The firm has been especially active in trying to overturn the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that ensures a woman’s right to abortion.

In an interview, Duff Conacher, on the board of Democracy Watch, said American companies shouldn’t be involved in Canadian elections. “It’s legal to engage the services of anyone you want during an election campaign but it’s very disturbing to see the Conservative Party using companies with these kinds of partisan (Republican) ties.”

Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, whose St. Paul riding saw tires slashed, brake lines cut and lawn signs taken down in the last two federal elections, told the Star she opposes the idea of using foreign companies because “if there were to be transgression, we don’t have the same resources to go after them as we do with Canadian firms.

“It bugs me. It just doesn’t seem right. It’s our country, our voters and our election.”

The Conservatives have outstripped other parties over the past decade in fundraising and honing its political machine. The party effectively uses the resources of the powerful Conservative global organization, the International Democratic Union (IDU), a coalition of member parties including the U.S. Republicans, the Canadian and U.K. Conservative parties and, in the Australia, the centre-right Liberals.

The Harper team has been adept at learning from election technology seminars from other countries using IDU — called “off-shoring” — and keeping its people in prominent positions within the organization. In a legendary example, strategist Patrick Muttart adopted voter identification techniques from Howard in Australia that included breaking voters into tight little groups to target them on campaign drives.

Currently, Senator Doug Finley, Harper’s former campaign director is a deputy chair at IDU. Charges under the Elections Canada Act against Finley and Senator Irving Gerstein were dropped last year, but the party was found guilty and fined $52,000 for overspending in the “in-and-out” scandal, in which riding funds were funnelled into national advertising.

Fred DeLorey, the party’s director of communications who on Thursday accused Liberals of hiring U.S. firms, called the ruling: “a big victory for the Conservative Party of Canada.”

A Liberal analyst who spoke on background said that nobody should think the Liberals are virtuous. Rather, he said: “There has been a global revolution that has transformed every aspect of politics in the last five years. The Conservatives know how to take technologies from other parties in other countries and they do it better than anybody else. The problem is I don’t think Elections Canada can keep up.”

Ron Shaiko, a senior fellow at the Rockefeller Centre at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College, tracks get-out-vote techniques as well as “voter suppression” in the U.S.

“In the U.S. the people who work to suppress voter turnout are the Republicans for a simple reason,’ he said. “Historically, the lower the turnout, the better it is for Republicans. High turnout means Democratic wins.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1140344--conservative-mps-used-top-republican-firm-during-may-election?bn=1

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Ron Shaiko, a senior fellow at the Rockefeller Centre at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College, tracks get-out-vote techniques as well as “voter suppression” in the U.S.

“In the U.S. the people who work to suppress voter turnout are the Republicans for a simple reason,’ he said. “Historically, the lower the turnout, the better it is for Republicans. High turnout means Democratic wins.”

http://www.thestar.c...y-election?bn=1

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There are surveys and polls. The Conservatives have people who call and ask if you will contribute to their campaign. If you say you are going to vote Liberal or NDP, they record it.

One lady in Mission was in the newspaper for just this reason. She said she got called multiple times by the Conservatives asking to donate money. She got annoyed after receiving multiple calls and said she was going to vote NDP. A few days later she got a call from the same number telling her the polling station had moved. She told the person they were wrong and it hadn't changed and the other person hung up immediately.

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