Robocalls: The seven deadly ridings

By Allison@Creekside

As a follow up to my earlier chart showing Steve’s Margin of Victory in ridings with the closest vote margins, I’ve adjusted it to include only the seven being contested in court for voter fraud and added two columns of polling data from an EKOS research paper based on a recent phone survey of 4797 voters. It compares 106 ridings where there were no reports of suspicious activity to the seven ridings where there was a lot — election phone calls made to voters to identify who they intended to vote for followed up by a call falsely telling them their polling station had moved.

Only one of them — Vancouver Island North — had an actual polling station change.

So according to the Ekos poll, if you lived in Winnipeg South Centre, for example, where the Cons took the riding by only 1.8% of the vote, you had a 71% chance of getting a phone call asking you who you were going to vote for. And if you subsequently got a follow-up call regarding polling stations, you had a 30% chance of being told your polling station had changed even though it hadn’t.

If however you lived in one of the 106 other ridings used as a control group, you had a 44% chance of being asked your voting intention and only a 14.7% chance of later being given false polling station info.

From the Council of Canadians, who commissioned the EKOS poll and are supporting the court actions, come these other key findings:

• 16.9% of eligible voters received calls related to polling stations. Of those, 22.3% were told of polling station location changes (amounting to 3.77% of eligible voters).
• Of those who were told of polling station changes, the voter intentions were as follows: Liberals 32.6%, Greens 28%, NDP 25.6%, and Conservatives 10%.
• 42.5% of eligible voters who received calls related to polling stations had a call claiming to be from Elections Canada.

And I can already feel a chilly if friendly wind blowing from the infinitely more rigorous Alice Funke at Pundits’ Guide, who would never mix up apples and hand grenades like this in the same chart (ie., adding a polling sample onto Elections Canada Official Voting Results).

But if the EKOS poll is accurate, then up to 15% of the vote in those seven closest vote margin ridings — some 50,000 people — received phone calls deliberately intended to suppress the non-Steve vote.

Margin of victory riding data from Elections Canada Official Voting Results Table 12.

Last two columns in chart taken from data in EKOS Study