Affidavit rebuts robocall claims
Tories respond to lawsuit aimed at overturning results
The federal Conservatives have for the first time responded in detail to allegations that they were involved in fraudulent phone calls aimed at suppressing the votes of opposition voters during the last election.
Such charges are “categorically false,” says a detailed affidavit filed in federal court Wednesday by Andrew Langhorne, chief operating officer of Responsive Marketing Group, the Conservatives’ main voter contact firm.
Langhorne filed the affidavit as part of the Conservative party’s response to a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results in seven ridings where Conservatives won close elections in May 2011. Opposition supporters in those ridings have filed affidavits alleging that they were contacted by call centre workers who misdirected them to the wrong polling station, seemingly in an effort to discourage them from voting.
The Conservatives have always rejected allegations that the party had anything to do with voter suppression calls, although local volunteers have been linked to an as-yet inconclusive 16-month Elections Canada investigation of a deceptive robocall that sent hundreds to the wrong poll in Guelph, Ont.
A key piece of evidence in the suit launched by left-leaning Council of Canadians is the affidavit of Annette Desgagnes, who worked in a Responsive Marketing Group call centre in Thunder Bay in the run-up to the May 2011 election.
In February, after media reports of an apparent pattern of deceptive reports, Desgagnes told the Toronto Star that during the campaign, workers at the Thunder Bay call centre were so rattled by calls they were asked to make that she contacted the RCMP.
In her affidavit, filed in April, she said that in the final days of the election, she and other callers were given scripts that identified them as calling on behalf of the “voter outreach centre.” They told people they called that Elections Canada had moved many polling stations and offered to check the address. Many voters told her that the addresses she gave them were wrong, she says.