Daniel Speik, of Saint-Colomban, Quebec, says he didn’t vote in the last election because of robocalls that told him his polling station had moved.A few days before the election, Speik received two or three automated calls, in French, identified as coming from Elections Canada, telling him his polling station had moved, much like more than 1,000 Canadians who have filed complaints about deceptive election calls.
But Speik is the only complainant, in court documents so far made public, to say that the call stopped him from voting.
Speik, a former community college biology teacher who had moved to the small community north of Montreal, said the call confused him, and he didn’t know the location of the new polling place, so he didn’t vote.
“I didn’t go vote because of that, because I’m so busy,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’m new here from three years, and I don’t know really where they changed the place, so I didn’t go to vote.”
Speik is one of the complainants listed in two court documents recently released by Elections Canada as part of their investigation into 1,399 complaints of misleading or harassing telephone calls across the country during the last election.
The riding of Riviere-du-nord, long a Bloc stronghold, was won by NDP candidate Pierre Dionne Labelle. The Conservative came a distant third.
Speik contacted the agency after media reports about the “robocalls” scandal in March. Elections Canada investigators sifted through the complaints, contacted the complainants, and then sought court orders concerning complainants who received their phone service from Shaw, Videotron and Rogers.
Elections Canada released the applications for Shaw and Videotron — known as Informations to Obtain — on Nov. 28, when investigators received the phone records requested.
Conservatives have insisted that there is no evidence that anyone was prevented from voting by fraudulent poll-moving calls.
In the House of Commons on Monday, Pierre Poilievre, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of transport, twice made that point when asked about the calls.
“There is not a single person who is a single witness who has come forward in this case to say that he or she was not able to vote,” he said.
Most of the complainants listed in the Elections Canada documents were not prevented from voting by the calls, but an Information to Obtain from the investigation in Guelph, Ontario, reported that some voters sent to the wrong polling station by a robocall ripped up their voter cards in anger.
And Leeanne Bielli of Toronto, one of nine voters who filed election challenges in federal court based on fraudulent calls, filed an affidavit stating that she didn’t vote because she was confused by a call telling her her polling station had moved.
Bielli dropped her challenge when Conservative researchers discovered that she lived in Don Valley West, not Don Valley East, as she believed.
Many of the complainants reported receiving voter-identification calls before the election in which they said they supported opposition parties.
Speik said he received such a call, and likely identified himself as planning to vote for the Bloc Quebecois.
“I don’t hide that,” he said. “I don’t have a problem to speak of my opinions.”
Speik said that he didn’t think much about the call until he saw a report on the news.
“When I saw it on TV, I said ‘Oh my God, I got one too.’ ”
Speik says he now believes the call was an attempt to stop people from voting.
“They sent that to many people to stop them from voting,” he said. “That’s sure.”
The ITOs from Shaw and Videotron describe 65 calls from across the 57 ridings across the country, including 20 in Quebec. The complaints concern both live and recorded poll-moving calls.
Steven Shrybman, the lawyer leading the challenge of six elections in federal court, has presented the court documents as evidence in his case, citing them as proof of a pattern of a voter suppression campaign aimed at opposition supporters.
He had earlier sought more details from Elections Canada about its investigation but the agency declined, citing restrictions in the Canada Evidence Act.
The agency has filed another document requesting phone records from Rogers, which has many more subscribers than Shaw or Videotron, but investigators have not yet received the records, so the request is still under seal.
John Enright, a spokesman for Elections Canada, said Wednesday that Rogers was given 60 days to produce the records “ technical reasons regarding the accessibility of docs and data requested,” which means they may not be produced until Jan. 1, after the conclusion of the federal court case.
Shrybman said on Tuesday that he faces a difficult task in his court challenge, because he must prove “there are ballots that aren’t in the ballot box,” but cited the pattern evident in the documents from Elections Canada’s investigation and a survey produced by EKOS.
The Conservatives reject any suggestion that they engaged in voter suppression calls in the last election, and say the federal court case is a partisan attack by political opponents who don’t like the election results.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Stephen Maher
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