In an affidavit released Wednesday, Annette Desgagne said in the last few days before the May 2 election, scripts for callers at the Responsive Marketing Group’s Thunder Bay phone bank instructed them to identify themselves as calling from the “Voter Outreach Centre” and tell voters about last-minute changes Elections Canada had made to polling stations.
One caller, Desgagne claimed, identified himself as calling from Elections Canada.
Desgagne’s affidavit was filed as part of a series of court challenges launched by the Council of Canadians. The group alleges fraudulent phone calls in the last election affected the outcome of votes in seven ridings and wants the Federal Court to set the results aside.
The Conservatives dismissed the litigation as an attempt by the losers to change the outcome of the election.
“This is a transparent attempt to overturn certified election results simply because this activist group doesn’t like them,” said party spokesman Fred DeLorey in an emailed statement.
RMG issued its own statement, saying it called only Conservative supporters in the days leading up to the vote and that the scripts used by call workers clearly indicated they were calling on behalf of the party.
“(It) would make no sense for RMG to give identified Conservative supporters incorrect voting information,” the company said.
Desgagne, who began working in the Thunder Bay call centre about three weeks before the election, says for her first few weeks on the job, workers at the phone bank were engaged in voter-identification calls.
About three days before the election, Desgagne says, the scripts she was reading off a computer screen were changed to change-of-address calls.
“I started to become concerned about the Change of Address Calls, because several of the listeners with whom I spoke questioned me about the new polling location I was providing,” Desgagne said.
One woman from Winnipeg told Desgagne the new poll location she provided was over an hour away from her home, Desgagne said. In another call, she says, she gave a new poll location to a woman who had already voted in the lobby of her seniors residence.
“As these calls grew in number I became increasingly concerned that I was giving out incorrect information to voters.”
RMG claims that its callers did not make change-of-location calls, but, rather, made get-out-the-vote (GOTV) calls that included polling address confirmations.
“The scripts indicated that Elections Canada had changed ‘some’ polling locations — not that ‘their’ (that individual’s) location had changed,” the company said.
“The caller then asked the voter if they knew their location and, if that location was different from what the caller had on screen, informed them of the onscreen location.”
One of the results being challenged by the Council of Canadians is the Northern Ontario riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming, where Liberal incumbent Anthony Rota lost to Conservative Jay Aspin by only 18 votes.
Desgagne said in her statement that she specifically remembers making calls about a poll in Nipissing-Timiskaming because she had trouble pronouncing the name when speaking to voters.
The council has obtained a statement from Elections Canada’s lawyer stating that of the ridings involved in the litigation, only one — on Vancouver Island — had polling stations moved.
That suggests that, at the least, the information Desgagne provided about changing polling locations in Nipissing-Timiskaming was incorrect.
It also casts doubt on the Conservatives’ contention that calls misdirecting voters may have been the result of honest mistakes.
Desgagne said she also heard other RMG call workers raising concerns about the poll change calls.
“Many callers were still indicating during our breaks that listeners were telling them the change-of-address information we were giving was wrong.”
She says she told a supervisor she was worried she was sending people to the wrong locations, but was told to stick to the scripts provided.
“Our concerns were ignored and we had to keep reading and repeating the same scripts about changes of address for polling stations made by Elections Canada.”
Desgagne also said she heard another RMG call centre employee claim to be phoning from Elections Canada. She claims she told him, “Dude, you’re not from Elections Canada.”
Elections Canada never makes telephone calls about poll changes and, to avoid confusion, discourages parties from making them. Desgagne said she remembers RMG supervisors telling the callers on election day that it was important that they say they were calling from the Conservative Party of Canada, after several days where they did not identify the party.
When Desgagne heard reports on the radio about misleading calls, she said, “I became very concerned that I was participating in something that involved giving voters wrong information.
“My internal radar went off. I wrote down what I could recall from the script I was asked to read about Change of Address Calls and I arranged for the information to go to the RCMP.”
The Council of Canadians is using a rarely-used provision of the Elections Act that allows any elector to ask a court to set aside the result in his or her riding if there is convincing evidence of illegal or fraudulent activity that changed the outcome.
The council has focused on closely-contested seats where there have been reports of alleged voter suppression calls. So far, none of the winning candidates in the seven ridings have filed their statements of defence. Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton has suggested in an interview with the Toronto Star that the claims will not withstand legal scrutiny.
The council launched its legal challenges in Federal Court after the Citizen and Postmedia News reported on an Elections Canada investigation into robocalls made in Guelph and a pattern of suspicious live calls in other ridings.
Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand told a parliamentary committee last month that his agency has lodged about 800 complaints over live and automated election calls from 200 different ridings.
The Conservative Party has repeatedly stated that it did not engage in voter suppression calls in the last election, and has complained that it is the victim of a smear campaign.
The Citizen and Postmedia News reported earlier this week that Elections Canada investigators have been asking questions about an apparent gap in voter database access logs that the agency received from the party. The logs track who accesses the party’s Constituency Information Management System.
Investigators have also inquired about a May 1 phone call that a member of the Conservatives’ target seat team made to the voice broadcast company that was used to send deceptive robocalls in Guelph on election day, May 2.
On Tuesday, the New Democrats seized on the report of the apparent gap in data logs, and accused the Conservatives of erasing electronic records, comparing the missing information to a mysterious gap in audiotapes in the Watergate scandal.
In reaction, the Conservatives sent an email to supporters denying that Elections Canada is investigating the party.
“Contrary to media reports, the Conservative Party of Canada is not under investigation for what went on in Guelph,” said the email.
Party spokesman DeLorey did not respond to an email Wednesday asking how the party would know whether it was being investigated. Elections Canada does not typically confirm or deny facts about ongoing investigations.
In February, after reports of the apparent pattern of deceptive and fraudulent election calls, Elections Canada received thousands of online “contacts” calling for a full investigation, mostly as the result of an online petition.
The agency hired about 12 administrative workers to sort through the flood of electronic messages, passing specific allegations of wrongdoing on to Elections Canada’s veteran investigators, most of whom are former RCMP officers. Several people who filed complaints about seemingly deceptive calls have reported receiving subsequent calls from Elections Canada investigators.
Most complainants are opposition-party supporters who received a voter-identification call from the Conservatives early in the campaign, then received a live call in the last days of the campaign instructing them that their polling station had moved.
Conservatives point out that the party made millions of voter-identification and get-out-the-vote calls during the campaign, and suggest that misdirecting calls may be explained by bad data, caller error or incorrect recollections by the people who received the calls.
Both the Conservative Party and RMG say they have reached out proactively, seeking to help Elections Canada in its investigation.
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher
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