“Hired live phoners or automated calling systems are only as good as the data provided to them. You know the saying, ‘garbage in, garbage out,’ ” said Maurice Vellacott, the MP for Saskatoon-Wanuskewin, in a statement released to media Monday.
“I suspect that at the end of the day, if Elections Canada has the resources to do a proper investigation, they’ll find they’re themselves significantly responsible, that tech issues with marrying EC lists to available, electronic phone lists is part of the problem, and in a few instances there may have been malfeasance by one (political) party or the other,” wrote Vellacott.
“Let’s reserve judgment until the full story comes out.”
Until now, most Conservative MPs and Prime Minister Stephen Harper have suggested that the alleged instances of misdirecting voters were either the work of a lone, or rogue political operatives; or the work of the Liberal party’s telemarketers having made errors; or the result of honest, inadvertent errors made by sincere get-out-the-vote calls that were tripped up by Elections Canada having made changes to some 127 polling locations.
On Monday, Harper’s parliamentary secretary MP Dean Del Mastro, who stood in for Harper to respond in the Commons, insisted any mess-ups were the fault of the Liberals alone.
Now Vellacott, an outspoken MP on the judiciary and pro-life issues, says he issued the statement because there has been too much “hyperbole” around robo-calls. In an interview he clarified that he did not intend to suggest incompetence at Elections Canada headquarters, and does not have an opinion on whether it is able to conduct the necessary inquiry into complaints.
Vellacott told the Star he was merely highlighting Elections Canada’s “difficulty” with tracking voters’ addresses between campaigns, now that there is no voter enumeration exercise. “I’m not faulting Elections Canada for the very difficult job of tracking this information.”
In fact, he admitted some of the issues of combining Elections Canada’s voter name and address information with telephone numbers presents “technical” challenges to national party headquarters, which he said is mainly charged with the job of updating the supporter-contact lists.
Andrew MacDougall, spokesman for the Prime Minister, said in an email: “They are Mr. Vellacott’s views.”
Asked if a public inquiry is needed at this stage, MacDougall said only, “Elections Canada is investigating. The Conservative Party has been cooperating fully with Elections Canada.”
Vellacott, MP for Saskatoon-Wanuskewin, pointed to mistakes made during the 2008 campaign, when he said his constituents got voting cards “telling them to vote on the other side of the river in Aberdeen. Not only is that an unreasonably long way to have voters go to cast a ballot, but it’s not even in our Saskatoon-Wanuskewin constituency.”
Vellacott said there have been “numerous address errors by Elections Canada in every one of six federal elections I’ve contested.”
He said it is “no reflection on our faithful” local district returning officers or their aides.
Instead, he said, “errors and misinformation are compiled and compounded by Elections Canada’s head office. We don’t even bother trying to chase down, trace back and correct all these Elections Canada errors anymore. Too much valuable campaign time would be used up on such a project.”
Vellacott said each party “contesting a riding gets a preliminary CD of enumerated voters, and in the final week before polling day, each campaign receives a final voters list on CD.”
The Elections Canada list of voter names and addresses are sometimes incorrect, and it indicates poll locations “which sometimes EC has to change,” but it does not provide phone numbers.
“The political parties attempt to merge these lists with Canada 411 and other electronic phone books, in order for the campaigns to phone electors.”
Vellacott says it’s “not a perfect system by any means.”
But he still insists the likelihood of error is due to Elections Canada’s inability to be more precise.
“Because Elections Canada too frequently provides incorrect information, and secondly because technological problems occur with trying to merge Elections Canada info for phone lists, there is a significant potential for error.”
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Tonda MacCharles
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