The advocacy group is backing a series of court challenges brought by voters who claim live and pre-recorded calls changed the outcome in the seven ridings, all won by Conservatives.
A poll conducted by Frank Graves at EKOS Research, entered in evidence in the Federal Court cases, found that a significant number of opposition supporters in targeted ridings reported receiving deceptive phone calls telling them their polling stations had moved.
Graves’ survey is a central piece of evidence in the legal action seeking to overturn election results, since it appears to show the existence of an organized voter-suppression scheme to the benefit of Conservative candidates.
The Conservatives have repeatedly tried to shut down the case, arguing that it is a partisan exercise by political opponents who are seeking to overturn legitimate electoral results that they dislike.
In an affidavit filed earlier this month, an expert witness retained by the Conservative party gave a lengthy critique of the methodology of a survey that suggested pre-recorded and live telephone calls discouraged non-Conservatives from voting in 2011 in certain ridings.
Toronto market researcher Ruth Corbin found “profound problems” with Graves’ findings, saying that it included “serious violations of published industry standards.”
The survey was conducted too long after the election and it is unlikely respondents could remember receiving calls, she said. She also said the automated interactive voice-response system (IVR) that Graves used was a kind of robocall of its own and would not yield reliable results.
In an affidavit filed by the council Friday, Univerity of Toronto political science professor Neil Nevitte writes that Corbin’s judgment is too harsh.
Many of the grounds on which Corbin based her critique are “factually incorrect,” Nevitte writes, saying that she “seems to doggedly assume that absence of full documentation means that standard operating procedures were not followed.
“That assumption is not a generous one,” he writes. “It crosses the boundary of honest disagreement.”
Nevitte writes that Corbin ignores the central finding of Graves’ poll: more opposition supporters than Conservative supporters report receiving change-of-polling-station calls.
“If the calls regarding the change in location of polling stations were random, then there should be no differences in the frequency with which people with different partisan inclinations would report that they were contacted.”
Nevitte said that, contrary to Corbin’s concerns about IVR being impersonal, the technology can yield more accurate data because respondents are not affected by the social factors involved in face-to-face interviews.
He said Corbin wrongly reached a “dismissive conclusion” about the effects of the delay between the election and the survey.
“It seems more plausible to suppose instead, particularly for partisans, that such a call would be memorable because it was an ‘unusual’ event during a salient period.”
Graves also filed an affidavit defending his poll, in which he writes that Corbin’s points “lie well outside the realm of fair debate and comment.”
He says many of her objections are based on the lack of availability of his data and ignore the fact he posted it on his website. And, he says, nothing in her affidavit contradicts his findings.
Graves writes, “even if the more plausible criticisms presented by Ms. Corbin were to be accepted, and they should not be, they would still not explain the profound and statistically significant observed differences between the comparison and target ridings, and most importantly between Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) and Non-CPC supporters.”
Ultimately, it will be left to a judge to sift through the sometimes complicated and picayune debate over methodology and statistical analysis.
The cases are unlikely to be heard in court before December.
If the applicants can convince a judge that the calls changed the outcome of the election in those ridings, the results would be set aside and byelections called.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor
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