The United States and Mexico have not been the only places where the right wing has committed electoral fraud to win recent elections. There is evidence to suggest the Conservative Party of Canada used voter suppression schemes to help it win the 2011 elections. While ballot boxes didn’t actually go missing, the Conservatives may have flooded ridings (electoral districts) with automated, pre-recorded phone messages designed to disfranchise supporters of rival candidates. In the Ontario riding of Guelph, it is alleged by Elections Canada, the country’s election authority, that a Conservative operative using the alias “Pierre Poutine” made automated calls to suppress votes. During the 2011 elections, there was a tight race between the leading Conservative and Liberal Party candidates. False messages, supposedly from Elections Canada, sent hundreds of rival non-Conservative voters chasing non-existent polling stations on Election Day.
The theory behind the automated calls was that voters who ended up in the wrong place were usually unlikely to persist in finding another polling station and gave up trying to cast a ballot. Despite the false phone calls, however, Liberal candidate Frank Valeriote beat Conservative challenger Marty Burke by a comfortable margin.
Now opposition parties and the media allege, based on a deluge of complaints from voters, that phony automated messages supposedly from Elections Canada were also aimed at voters in 70 other ridings (out of 308). Some of the phone calls were sending voters to non-existent polling stations while others were of a harassing nature. In the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence last year, the Liberal Party alleges that hundreds of its supporters were called at inconvenient hours — late night, supper time or on the Sabbath for Jewish voters by people representing themselves as Liberal Party workers.
Full Article: Vote suppression takes place in Canada too » peoplesworld.