I’ve been reading the coverage in the Ottawa Citizen about phone calls that were made during the federal election that appeared to be trying to suppress the Liberal vote, either by having the caller pretend to be with the Liberal candidate’s campaign and making harassing calls or through other tactics.
That put me in mind of a strange incident that happened during the Vancouver election campaign. The COPE office phoned me, telling me that they’d had a complaint from a woman who said she’d been called by a COPE volunteer and was then sworn at and insulted. The woman had copied the phone number down and, when COPE checked into it, it wasn’t one of their numbers.
They wondered if someone was running a vote-suppression calling campaign, but they didn’t hear any other reports of similar calls. I also put out a tweet during the election asking about those kinds of calls but got no response.
I wondered who would bother and why, but they thought it could possibly be someone affiliated with the NPA, since they believed (and that turned out to be true) that COPE and NPA candidates were in a fight to get enough votes at the bottom of the list to get elected.
I dismissed it because I didn’t hear any other reports like that, but when I read some of this Ontario coverage, it makes me wonder whether someone here didn’t at least dabble in this technique.