statement saying his campaign office had received complaints about the misleading calls. He passed on the evidence to Elections Canada and the Guelph police.
Other irregularities occurred as well. In Montreal, residents of an apartment complex showed up to vote and found that their names were already crossed off the voters list. In Etobicoke Centre, reports came in that Conservative officials had disrupted voting at a polling station. Radio stations began broadcasting warnings about the misleading automated phone calls. In Guelph, where nearly seven thousand calls were made, the university put out a campus-wide email warning that the message about polling location changes was false.
At first, Valeriote thought he was dealing with a few nuisance calls, but he quickly realized it was nothing less than an orchestrated effort to discourage his supporters from voting. In Guelph at least, someone was trying to steal the election. Voter suppression, a well-known campaign tactic in US politics, was virtually unknown in Canada. Valeriote sent a campaign worker to the mall with a binder of polling maps to redirect Liberal supporters to the correct polls. Within an hour, one hundred misdirected voters had turned up at the false location. They were angry and frustrated. Parking was hard to find at the Old Quebec Street Mall, and some of the adjacent streets were under construction. The crowd soon doubled. When they realized that they’d been duped, some people hurried to vote at the correct location. But several voters tore up their voter information cards on the spot. The would-be voters included disabled people using walkers and mothers with strollers, and some had been dropped off by friends because of the difficulty with finding parking. Now they were stranded. The level of “inconvenience” was significant.
The returning officer for Guelph was deluged with calls from voters who had received the same misleading call as Susan Campbell and Ben Grossman. The phony calls were also causing problems at the campaign headquarters of Conservative candidate Marty Burke, or at least they appeared to be. At 10:13 a.m., just ten minutes after the misleading calls began, Michael Sona, Burke’s communications director, put out a press release condemning the scam: “Today, many of our supporters have received misleading phone calls regarding voting in the General election,” the twenty-two-year-old said. “This group is telling them that their polling location has changed. This is absolutely false, and has no place in the democratic process.”
Sona’s expeditious action would seem to warrant praise. Instead, his press release elicited what he described as a “furious” call from national Conservative Party headquarters. They wanted to know “what the hell was going on in Guelph.” When Sona answered his cellphone, he found Fred DeLorey on the line. Normally evenkeeled, the Conservative Party’s spokesperson was angry. Sona recalled, “I started to explain the calls that had been going out misdirecting people, but that’s not what they were mad about. They wanted to know why I had issued a press release. They ordered me to make no further comments that day. That’s the way it was, very rough, tons of stress. HQ wanted to control everything. . . .”
The voter suppression scandal actually began before election day, and it wasn’t confined to Guelph. Three days before the general election, complaints began arriving at Elections Canada. People reported “robocalls” in Guelph, and “live” calls in other places where someone allegedly impersonating a representative of Elections Canada was redirecting voters to the wrong polls. As emails to Elections Canada later indicated, Canadians across the country believed they had been targeted by people calling on behalf of the Conservative Party of Canada. This was days beforeMichael Sona’s press release focused the national media’s attention on Guelph as the epicentre of what would
Other irregularities occurred as well. In Montreal, residents of an apartment complex showed up to vote and found that their names were already crossed off the voters list. In Etobicoke Centre, reports came in that Conservative officials had disrupted voting at a polling station. Radio stations began broadcasting warnings about the misleading automated phone calls. In Guelph, where nearly seven thousand calls were made, the university put out a campus-wide email warning that the message about polling location changes was false.
At first, Valeriote thought he was dealing with a few nuisance calls, but he quickly realized it was nothing less than an orchestrated effort to discourage his supporters from voting. In Guelph at least, someone was trying to steal the election. Voter suppression, a well-known campaign tactic in US politics, was virtually unknown in Canada. Valeriote sent a campaign worker to the mall with a binder of polling maps to redirect Liberal supporters to the correct polls. Within an hour, one hundred misdirected voters had turned up at the false location. They were angry and frustrated. Parking was hard to find at the Old Quebec Street Mall, and some of the adjacent streets were under construction. The crowd soon doubled. When they realized that they’d been duped, some people hurried to vote at the correct location. But several voters tore up their voter information cards on the spot. The would-be voters included disabled people using walkers and mothers with strollers, and some had been dropped off by friends because of the difficulty with finding parking. Now they were stranded. The level of “inconvenience” was significant.
The returning officer for Guelph was deluged with calls from voters who had received the same misleading call as Susan Campbell and Ben Grossman. The phony calls were also causing problems at the campaign headquarters of Conservative candidate Marty Burke, or at least they appeared to be. At 10:13 a.m., just ten minutes after the misleading calls began, Michael Sona, Burke’s communications director, put out a press release condemning the scam: “Today, many of our supporters have received misleading phone calls regarding voting in the General election,” the twenty-two-year-old said. “This group is telling them that their polling location has changed. This is absolutely false, and has no place in the democratic process.”
Sona’s expeditious action would seem to warrant praise. Instead, his press release elicited what he described as a “furious” call from national Conservative Party headquarters. They wanted to know “what the hell was going on in Guelph.” When Sona answered his cellphone, he found Fred DeLorey on the line. Normally evenkeeled, the Conservative Party’s spokesperson was angry. Sona recalled, “I started to explain the calls that had been going out misdirecting people, but that’s not what they were mad about. They wanted to know why I had issued a press release. They ordered me to make no further comments that day. That’s the way it was, very rough, tons of stress. HQ wanted to control everything. . . .”
The voter suppression scandal actually began before election day, and it wasn’t confined to Guelph. Three days before the general election, complaints began arriving at Elections Canada. People reported “robocalls” in Guelph, and “live” calls in other places where someone allegedly impersonating a representative of Elections Canada was redirecting voters to the wrong polls. As emails to Elections Canada later indicated, Canadians across the country believed they had been targeted by people calling on behalf of the Conservative Party of Canada. This was days beforeMichael Sona’s press release focused the national media’s attention on Guelph as the epicentre of what would
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