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Robocalls 'conspiracy' to cheat voters, NDP says

Illegal calls directing voters to non-existent or incorrect polling stations during the last federal election, traced by Elections Canada to an Edmonton call centre, are the same as "goons with clubs" blocking people from voting, New Democratic MP Pat Martin says.

The Ottawa Citizen report says an Elections Canada investigation traced the calls, a tactic used to suppress election participation, to a company in Edmonton called Racknine, which provides a service that allows a recorded message to be sent to multiple phone numbers.

"How is this different from a bunch of goons with clubs blocking the door to a voter station as we’ve seen in third world countries or the deep south of the United States? Because the net effect is the same," Martin said, calling it a heinous crime against democracy.

The company has been used in the past by Conservative candidates, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to conduct legitimate phone campaigns. There is no evidence any Conservative candidates were involved in the fraudulent calls, the Citizen report said.

"The Conservative Party of Canada ran a clean and ethical campaign and would never tolerate such activity," Jenni Byrne, the Conservative Party's national campaign manager for the 2011 election, said in a statement.

"The party was not involved with these calls and if anyone on a local campaign was involved they will not play a role in a future campaign."

Byrne says voter suppression is "extremely serious."

"If anything improper occurred, those responsible should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

"We spent the entire campaign identifying supporters and we worked hard to get them out to vote. Our job is to get votes out, we do not engage in voter suppression."

Martin says the strategy was "a conspiracy to undermine a person’s right to vote" and that it draws into question the number of votes the Conservative Party won. The party received 39.6 per cent of votes to win a majority government. The NDP won 30.6 per cent.

Elections Canada had reports from several ridings from voters in Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia who claim to have been given false information that directed them to the wrong place to vote, CBC reported on May 2, 2011, the day of the federal election.

The calls reportedly went out in Ottawa, Guelph and Winnipeg-South Centre. CBC later learned of calls in Kitchener-Waterloo too.

The Liberals say Etobicoke Centre was also affected.

Martin says the NDP have reports of calls going to

Parkdale-High Park

Ottawa Centre

Windsor-Tecumseh

Sudbury

Edmonton East

Davenport

Thunder Bay-Superior North

South Shore St-Margaret

Liberal MP John McCallum, speaking at a news conference in Ottawa on Thursday morning, said he hopes the Conservatives co-operate with any investigation.

"I think it's relevant the degree to which the Conservative Party had ties to this company, yes," he said.

"We don't have a smoking gun pointing to Stephen Harper or the Conservative Party, but we do know that these actions benefited the Conservative Party. We do know that the strategy of vote repression has been in their toolkit for some time, so there are definitely suspicions.

"I think it's also a technique that the Conservative Party has borrowed from its Republican friends to the south, where the technique, I think, is more developed."

McCallum pointed to a tight race in Etobicoke Centre, saying if a dozen people stayed home, it's possible it changed the outcome of the election.

Nycole Turmel, the interim NDP leader, took aim at the Conservatives in a statement.

"Cynical old-style politics have become a trademark for the Conservatives," Turmel said. "Just a few months ago, they pled guilty to breaking election spending laws, now they’ve upped the ante with what looks like the most widespread and systematic voter suppression campaign in Canadian history."

Elections Canada said in its post-election report that the commissioner of elections was looking into complaints of "crank calls designed to discourage voting, discourage voting for a particular party, or incorrectly advise electors of changed polling locations."

A spokesman for Elections Canada said the agency's practice is to neither confirm nor deny whether it has received complaints or is investigating.

The commissioner of Elections Canada works under the chief electoral officer to make sure the Canada Elections Act is enforced.