“In any election situation now, you have so much money and technology bearing down on voting behaviour and voter mobilization and voter persuasion, that there’s a real question of whether our system of ensuring fair, open and transparent elections is really up to scratch,” said John Duffy, a former adviser to former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin and author of the bestselling, Fights of Our Lives: Elections, Leadership and the Making of Canada.
“What you’re seeing now is a field where potential abuse, like the abuses that parties might cook up to ‘game’ the system, are playing a bigger role again. I think it’s arguable that Elections Canada’s capacity hasn’t kept up with the ability of the parties to ‘game’ the system,” Mr. Duffy said last week in an interview with The Hill Times.
Conservative pundit Tim Powers said that elections campaigns are increasingly “becoming battles run by trained professionals with advanced approaches, more sophisticated data analysis and new tools.”
“I think Elections Canada probably has to play catch-up as the working culture of elections in Canada changes. Elections, for a variety of reasons, are becoming for those who contest them any way less amateurish, grassroot-ish, worked by well-meaning volunteers,” Mr. Powers said.
“You don’t send a minor hockey referee to oversee NHL games,” Mr. Powers added.
Elections Canada’s ability to ensure the integrity of Canadian elections has been put under the microscope lately as a result of the robocalls scandal, and as two candidates in the riding of Etobicoke Centre, Ont., battle over whether errors by Elections Canada staff allowed ineligible people to vote in the election last year, and whether this had an effect on the outcome of that election.
Conservative MP Ted Opitz won in Etobicoke Centre with a margin of just 26 votes over Liberal incumbent Borys Wrzenewskyj in 2011.
An Ontario Superior Court judge ruled that 79 voters in the 2011 election were able to cast ballots though there were errors in their eligibility paperwork, or those documents were missing outright. The ruling meant that Mr. Opitz would have to fight in a byelection to hold onto his seat.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard the rookie MP’s appeal of that decision in a rare summer court date.
Mr. Opitz’s lawyer, Kent Thomas, contested the idea that the clerical errors were serious enough grounds to disqualify those voters and overturn the election.
Gavin Tighe, Mr. Wrzenewskyj’s representative, argued that without the proper assurances that only those who were qualified to vote did so, the integrity of the electoral system and the value of a vote is called into question.
The Supreme Court has yet to rule.
No matter the outcome, Mr. Wrzesnewskyj has said, the case will have an effect on how elections are run in Canada.
“Whatever the decision is, however it lands, I guarantee you that the next federal election in Canada will be run very differently and all of us win,” said Mr. Wrzesnewskyj on CBC’s Power and Politics, July 10.
But the way elections are fought in Canada is already changing, say political insiders.
Liberal MP Wayne Easter (Malpeque, P.E.I.), who has been elected to Parliament seven times and is in his 19th year on the job, told The Hill Times last week that while he runs a comparatively traditional campaign, it has changed substantially over the years with the introduction of new technologies.
“Now it’s very, very much more sophisticated than it was in the beginning,” he said.
“Parties have the electronic lists, there’s more telephone calling being made, there’s voice drops, all those kinds of things. Technology is playing a much, much, bigger role than it used to,” he explained.
Mr. Duffy said that GOTV—which stands for get out the vote—technologies are now able to help campaigns mobilize voters to an unprecedented degree.
GOTV is a staple phrase that dots the campaign returns of candidates who engage outside firms to conduct voter contact. It can stand for a number of things, including automated phone calls on election day, email blasts, direct advertising, and radio, television and web ads, according to Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Technology has also changed the way candidates manage voter lists in their riding. Candidates can track an individual’s voting preferences, allowing them to minimize time wasted on people not likely to vote for them, and expend the most energy on getting the people most likely to vote for them to cast their ballot, noted Mr. Duffy, who has volunteered on Liberal election campaigns since the 1970s.
He said that as late as the 1970s, political parties put a lot of their effort into controlling voter lists, into putting partisan people at polling stations and into which ballots were counted. In recent years, the trend moved away from control to persuading voters through television ads and other mediums. Now, the pendulum is swinging back.
“The result is that mobilization, and getting out your vote to the polls has become more and more important with each passing campaign, and this is a worldwide phenomenon,” said Mr. Duffy.
He said that new technologies are allowing candidates to mobilize their voters at unprecedented levels, helping determine the outcome of tight ridings.
It’s questionable whether Elections Canada has been able to keep up with the political parties in adopting the newest technologies, he said.
“It’s not like they have an unlimited budget, and it’s not like they have access to all of the most cutting-edge technology in the way that the parties do,” he said.
Conservative pundit Geoff Norquay said that it’s unclear what Elections Canada could do to prevent people from doing “illegal or immoral things in the get out the vote process.”
But Mr. Norquay said that while it’s clear the actions in a case like the robocalls scandal are illegal, automated telephone calling is still a “relatively blunt instrument” in Canada.
Mr. Powers said that his concern is less about the technology being used and more about the motives of those using it.
“I don’t know of any systems per se but it never is usually about the system, it is about the people who design them and their motivations that are the issue. Unscrupulous people are unscrupulous. They will always find ways to be devious for their purposes,” he said.
The swing back to mobilization and control over voting lists comes at a time when fewer people are volunteering for political parties, noted Mr. Duffy.
Elections Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer, Marc Mayrand told the House of Commons Procedure and House Affairs Committee March 29 that candidates “play an important role” in the integrity voting system on election day by appointing scrutineers.
Mr. Duffy said that workers from each party keep the other honest, but that nowadays some candidates can’t spare a volunteer to be there the whole day. He said in some cases, there isn’t even a representative around to scrutineer when the ballots are being counted.
“A lot of the parties say no thanks because they need those bodies to do something else. So the quality, I can tell you, of deputy returning officers, has become more patchy,” he said.
Mr. Powers said that whether or not a candidate sends staff to a polling station depends on their resources and how they want to deploy them.
“Candidate scrutineers may fall behind in importance these days behind using volunteer resources to get out the vote. Different candidates though will have different practices, he said.
Mr. Duffy stated that one outcome of the Etobicoke Centre dispute will likely be that candidate will start devoting more resources to scrutineering again.
The robocalls controversy is an example of automated GOTV technology being used to misdirect voters who had been identified as likely to vote Liberal in Guelph, Ont. to non-existent polling stations. More than a year after the election, the alleged perpetrator, known as Pierre Poutine, has yet to be caught.
“What you’re seeing now is a field where potential abuse, like the abuses that parties might cook up to game the system are playing a bigger role again. I think it’s arguable that Elections Canada’s capacity hasn’t kept up with the ability of the parties to game the system,” said Mr. Duffy.
Mr. Mayrand told members of the House Affairs Committee that in light of what happened in Etobicoke Centre, his agency is now looking at how to make sure its workers follow procedures to the letter on voting day.
“These are very serious matters that strike at the integrity of our democratic process. If they are not addressed and responded to, they risk undermining an essential ingredient of a healthy democracy, namely the trust that electors have in the electoral process,” said Mr. Mayrand.
Elections Canada hired 235,000 temporary workers in the 40 days leading up to a general election, Mr. Thomson told the court July 10.
Mr. Mayrand said that in the 2011 election, there were more than 70,000 polling stations at 23,000 locations across Canada.
While Elections Canada has an enormous task ahead of it as it organizes and trains thousands of workers before an election the electoral system is generally protected, said Mr. Easter.
“I think a lot of the safeguards are in place,” he stated, adding, “there’s no question there needs to be updates to the system from time to time in the new age.”
Mr. Easter also said giving Elections Canada the ability and authority to conduct swift investigations into wrongdoing during an election would help deal with any problems.
“There needs to be some way of trying to deal with that during an election,” he said, adding that parties use technologies like automated phone calls for legitimate reasons.
“You have to find a legitimate balance, and that’s certainly an area where I think Elections Canada needs to do some work,” he said.
Mr. Mayrand said that not just Elections Canada, but also the candidates, the media, political parties and the voters themselves have a role to play in ensuring the integrity of Canada’s elections.
“The quality of our democracy depends on the vigilance and conduct of all the players involved,” he said.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Jessica Bruno
No comments:
Post a Comment