Tuesday 6 March 2012

More CON fraudulent fun with phones.

It appears that the CPC has engaged in other scam practices with phones. It's not enough that companies were paid (more on that below) to contact voters and *prank* them with harassing calls, while pretending to be the other parties.

It engineered a campaign to call voters on Election Day, claim to be representing Elections Canada and deliberately direct them to a wrong location that was ^NOT a polling station. This Rovian tactic is called voter suppression. It is a criminal act for people to impersonate EC staff.

Now it appears the CONtempt Party has been trying to pressure and scam vulnerable elders to donate money to it. From Le Devoir:
[...] voters complained that they had been asked relentlessly by the Conservative Party to donate, being told - wrongly - that they had promised to pay $ 200.

This happened to Fernand Coulombe of Montmagny. The man, who turns 90 in September, said he was called "three or four times" by a lady of the Conservative Party last June - after the general elections in May. She told him to pay $200. because she he had promised to pay this contribution.

"She told me that I promised that. I did not promise anything! I do not even know her, and besides, I did not vote for them, "said Mr. Coulombe in an interview with Le Devoir.

In addition, Mr. Coulombe was mailed a letter from the Conservative Party, addressed to him and dated June 3, 2011. Under the party's logo, it is written in bold: "Thank you for your generous pledge of: $ 200.00." In the upper right corner of the document appears a bar code, a series of identification codes and the phone number of Mr. Coulombe. The man lives in a long term care facility. [...]

The man does not understand how his personal information was used by the CPC. "It may have taken my name in the phone book." He insists he voted for the Liberal Party all his life and his family is well aware of this party loyalty.
Mr Coulombe brought his concerns to his MP, NDP François Lapointe who knows of others who were subjected to this scam. Lapointe is taking out advertisements in the riding's community papers to encourage other people who were subjected to this scam to come forward. He will help facilitate their formal complaints to Elections Canada.

A reminder: Lapointe's riding was the site of a curious reassignment of voter ballots on May 2nd. This was only discovered when he demanded a recount.

The payment scam: Andrew Prescott paid RackNine directly for robocalls done on behalf of his CPC candidate during the federal election. How many other CON supporters in other ridings, other campaigns, did the same? No paper trail, no reporting this as a campaign contribution.

4 comments:

Alison said...

Presumably Prescott was reimbursed by the Burke campaign. The article does not indicate that the payment to RackNine was a donation. The question is, I think, where did the money to repay him come from and why is there no record of either the invoices or the repayment?

fern hill said...

Another strange/fishy one. Con Lizon was invoiced by RMG, but didn't pay. It was a 'contribution'.

There is a ton of stuff to be investigated.

Niles said...

The Conservatives have become Bart Simpson.

"I didn't do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can't prove anything."

TV Tropes also has this covered.

Implausible Deniability

Some day, I will master html code.

Also, too. Ms Debee. If you could resend your contact info to me...again...

I had to took ole yeller out and send it to the farm. Got a new fangled shiny figurin' machine they say won't cack up on me. Mind, that was after I tried 'a startin' it and it showed me a shiny blue screen and I had to take it back and ask if this happened a lot...and the answer was a wide eyed look of dreadful awe at my destructive power and frankensteinian revenance of the demmed thing.

Beijing York said...

After viewing that Lizon link, a new retaining wall emerged with Barrie, Ontario's Electright campaign services.

They were Del Mastro's go to guys to do some electoral polling when the Ontario Conservative candidate in Peterborough was trailing the Liberal one. He apologized for meddling after the fact.

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