Three million at the advance polls? Call it the revenge of the robo-called

When more than three million people converge on advance polls in a Canadian election, something clearly is going on.

I think I’m going to call it ‘revenge’.

Four years after election fraudsters tried to keep voters away from the polls in 2011 with robocall warnings of “higher than expected turnout,” Canadians flocked to crowded advance polls with, well … higher than expected turnout.

About 3.6 million people went to the voting booths over the Thanksgiving weekend, undeterred by early reports of lineups and frustrating bureaucracy. Elections Canada says that represents a 70-plus per cent increase over the number of people who voted in advance polls in 2011.

Whatever else motivated these voters, they were spitting in the eye of the 2011 robocallers who thought it would only take warnings of pesky crowds to prevent Canadians from exercising their basic democratic rights. Those fraudulent calls, according to hundreds of complaints lodged with Elections Canada in 2011, usually included the phrase “due to higher than expected turnout” and misdirected voters to non-existent voting locations.

Many believed justice was served in this democratic debacle when a former Conservative staffer, Michael Sona, went to jail in 2014 for the scheme, or when a Federal Court judge ruled that there had indeed been a “widespread” plot to thwart voters’ rights.

But last weekend’s advance-voting turnout may be the most fitting justice of all, meted out by roughly 10 per cent of the Canadian electorate. It’s great to know that the courts take democracy seriously — even better to realize that millions of voters do as well.

And while we’re in this optimistic frame of mind, it might be worthwhile to give some credit to the machinery of modern campaigns — particularly those big databases that all the parties have been building. Perhaps they can be a force for good, rather than evil.

Yes, the Conservatives’ Constituent Information Management System (CIMS) probably helped to make the robocalls scam possible in 2011, but these campaign databases may be proving their worth in identifying voters and prodding them to the polls in 2015.

In the U.S., where much of this technology originated, voter turnout has been headed largely in the direction opposite to that of Canada’s in the past decade — up, not down. From a low of 54 per cent in the 2000 presidential election, American voter turnout climbed to 62 per cent in 2008 (though it did dip slightly to 57 per cent in 2012.) Much of that increase in turnout has been attributed to the rise in voter-outreach efforts, especially in the digital realm.

“There’s always been two campaigns since the Internet was invented, the campaign online and the campaign on the doors. What I wanted was, I didn’t care where you organized, what time you organized, how you organized, as long as I could track it, I can measure it, and I can encourage you to do more of it,” Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, told the Washington Post.

In Canada, all the parties have been following the trail blazed by American campaigns in this realm. Liberals and New Democrats in particular have been getting help and guidance from Obama’s strategists over the past few years as they struggle to catch up with CIMS’ digital advantage.

When the dust has settled after this election, it will be interesting to see whether it was the campaign online or the campaign at the doors that was responsible for the increase in advance-voter turnout. And for all the complaining you’ve heard about the longer campaign period, it may turn out that it was just long enough to awaken some civic enthusiasm in the electorate.

We also might want to track the role that the social media giants — particularly Twitter, Facebook and Google — played in prodding people to the polls.

Just last week, the Conservatives’ much-touted campaign guru, Lynton Crosby, was talking publicly about the importance of Facebook to his work. (Not his work in Canada, mind you — rumours of his current influence, we are learning, may have been greatly exaggerated.)

Crosby was indeed far from Canada last week — an ocean away, in fact. Media reports in Britain found him ambling through the U.K. Conservative gathering in Manchester, bamboozling Labour protesters by wearing red trousers and talking to a crowd about the uselessness of poll predictions, journalists and Twitter.

“Twitter does not influence ordinary voters. It’s just the voice of the angry,” Crosby was quoted as saying in The Times. “Journalists know nothing about voters and haven’t met one unless they pick up their dry cleaning.”

Crosby did say, however, that he’d helped pull off Prime Minister David Cameron’s surprise majority in Britain earlier this year with the help of Facebook. “We have targeted voters in marginal seats on Facebook,” he said.

So maybe that’s where Canadian Conservatives are, if they’re not attending Stephen Harper’s rallies. Or maybe they’re picking up their dry cleaning.

We have yet to see whether the huge increase in the advance-voter turnout will be matched by similar enthusiasm for voting on Monday, the actual election day. But already it seems we have a good-news story about our democracy: it’s going to take a lot more than reports of higher-than-expected turnout to thwart Canadians’ higher-than-expected turnout.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Susan Delacourt