The description of the 31,000 complaints that Elections Canada has received concerning the robocall scandal in various press reports are vague: we are told some of them report deliberately misleading phone calls but others concern merely harassing calls. The approximate ratio of harassing call complaints to misleading call complaints I have not been able to find out (let me know the source if you do know). Hmmm... I wonder what that ratio is.
I venture to guess that most of the complaints concern harassing calls rather than misleading calls. As I already discussed the possible source of the misleading calls in a previous post (and most of those complaints originate from just one riding: Guelph, a riding the Liberals won handily), I will concentrate my attention in this post to the harassing calls.
Why do I think most of the 31,000 complaints that Elections Canada has received are over harassing calls? Simple. Because I and many people I know were on the receiving end of those calls. The reason we did was because we are identified as Conservative supporters and the party did its best to get us to vote. As a result, our phones rang off the hook. Of course, none of us filed a complaint. Why? Because we are Conservative supporters and we want our party to do well. The calls we got during the writ period are just a petty annoyance.
So if Conservative supporters are not the people who filed the complaints, then who are?
Perhaps people who are not Conservative supporters. To see how they can end up on the list in spite of their views, we must understand how the party identifies supporters in the first place. One way it does is through door-to-door canvassing. In this process, a canvasser asks the resident if they support the local candidate. Sometimes the answer is an emphatic yes; sometimes a heated no; often it is more equivocal. That leaves it up to the judgement of the volunteer as to how to classify the response. This matter is not helped by the fact that there are only three options on the walk sheet: a smiley face (supporter), a frowny face (hostile) or a poker face (uncommitted). This means that a lifelong party supporter with the candidate’s sign on his lawn is classified the same as somebody volunteering a hesitant OK. Add wishful thinking on the part of the canvasser (most responses are uncommitted), to those expressing assent just to get rid of the canvasser faster, to people in the household who don’t agree with the person who answered the door, and you have the potential for a whole lot people getting robocalls who don’t like Harper.
I bet a vast majority of the Elections Canada complaints are of this nature.
The trouble for the Liberals and NDP is that annoying is not illegal. While the Liberals and NDP would doubtlessly assert pure motivations on their part as the reason why their phone banking has not elicited a similar volume of complaints, the answer is more prosaic: lack of money and organization prevented them from putting on the same campaign that Harper’s Conservatives were able to do.