I’ve written about both.  The first is legal, the second isn’t.

The legal:

Nowhere in the ad does Harper’s campaign team declare they were hoping to persuade one million Liberal voters to stay home.

But that in fact was their objective and they achieved it. Extensive focus group and polling research had told the Tories that while many Grits despised Harper, they also had serious misgivings about Dion’s “image” as a leader and his ability to communicate.

If they couldn’t persuade those million Liberal voters to come over to the blue team, the Conservatives concluded, they would persuade them to stay home on election day.

Thereafter, the Tories spared no expense in their multi-million-dollar voter suppression strategy. It worked.

One former Ontario Conservative candidate, Rob Davis, was in high dudgeon over the suggestion his party would ever, ever engage in voter suppression. Such a claim was “shameful,” he sniffed.

On the Sun’s website, the response from Conservatives was much the same, with some actually suggesting voter suppression does not happen or, if it does, it is the product of a conspiracy between leftists and the leftist media.

Wow. A conspiracy? Made-up? Let’s ask Glen Pearson about that.

Pearson is the well-regarded former Liberal MP for London West. Pearson had friends on all sides of the House of Commons. But he lost, narrowly, to a Conservative candidate — because of, in part, a well-orchestrated voter suppression campaign.

As Chip Martin detailed in the London Free Press, innumerable Liberal supporters in the hotly contested London ridings reported receiving late-night calls of harassment — spreading false information, for example, about polling stations being moved.

Most of the calls came from smear-for-hire call centres in Florida or the Dakotas, which were beyond the reach of Canadian law.

The coordinated campaign that Stephen Maher has uncovered – after a full year of dogged investigative work – falls into the latter category.  If we still have the Rule of Law in this country, someone will end up getting convicted for what has been done.  It’s the kind of thing I saw when I was an election observer in Bosnia in 1996: it’s no less than election fraud.

My friends Norman Spector and Darrell Bricker and I have been having a discussion on Twitter, this morning, as to whether the illegal vote-suppression campaign was (as Jenni Byrne et al. would have us believe) the work a few rogue elements, or whether it was a coordinated sub-campaign (as I and others believe it can only be).  Norman and Darrell aren’t sure it’s the latter.  For me and many others, it stretches credulity that a GOP-style campaign this sophisticated – across time zones, using central campaign lists, and at a great monetary cost – could have been put together by a few Conservative pups.  It’s impossible, actually.

Will anyone ever get to the bottom of it?  I hope so.  Mr. Maher (and Elections Canada), we’re all counting on you to answer the many questions that are seeping out of this fetid mess.

The CPC isn’t even original: their muse, as always.

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…the author now needs to withdraw from the Manning Centre conference, I think. You can’t condemn people this strongly one week, then appear at their conference the next.

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Get a load of this horseshit:

“The Conservative Party of Canada ran a clean and ethical campaign and would never tolerate such activity,” said the statement attributed to Jenni Byrne, who managed the Tories’ national campaign.

And then, today, this:

A Conservative staffer caught up in a scandal over fake election day phone calls to keep voters away from the polls has lost his job.

So, they did nothing wrong, and then – a mere 24 hours later! – they throw a future Conservative Senator under the bus. Then: did nothing wrong. Now: something went wrong, but we didn’t do it.

Make sense to you? Me neither.

However this one ends up, it follows the Reformatory MEP issues management standard operating procedure™:

1. Nothing to see here, move along. The Tim Horton’s crowd don’t care.
2. The Liberals did it first. Adscam, blah blah blah.
3. The young staffer who did this was acting without anyone’s knowledge or approval. Nothing to see here, move along, etc.
4. Rinse and repeat.

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Last night, I received a Twitter message from a National Post person, communicated in the way this person might communicate.  It was late.  When I tried to access his recommended link, I had to re-enter my password – which, on my Blackberry, Twitter occasionally asks you to do.  So I did.

Big mistake! Only a few minutes later, when my pal Jill Fairbrother sent an identical Twitter message as the National Post one, did I realize I’d been spammed.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.

To my 7,700 closest Twitter besties, I sincerely apologize for the weight-loss messages you have received; I apologize for future penis-enlargement messages you may receive.  Some of your responses (below) have been hilarious.  In the meantime, I have now changed my password, blah blah blah, and won’t be so gullible again.  (I think.)

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Kudos to the reporters who dug this one up. This is big, methinks. But the best part is the photo of this robocalling character, above. An instant classic.

From the story:

Elections Canada has traced fraudulent phone calls made during the federal election to an Edmonton voice-broadcast company that worked for the Conservative Party across the country.

While the agency investigates, aided by the RCMP, the Conservatives are conducting an internal probe. A party lawyer is interviewing campaign workers to find who was behind the deceptive “robocalls.”

Elections Canada launched its investigation after it was inundated with complaints about election day calls in Guelph, Ont., one of 18 ridings across the country where voters were targeted by harassing or deceptive phone messages in an apparent effort to discourage Liberal supporters from voting.

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A grainy (but goodie) one from the archives. Perhaps he can go complain about it again to Scott Anderson and Gord Fisher.

Oh, wait.

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“Lowering tone of the debate.” So says the one who was using social media to do precisely that, for days.

UPDATE: One commenter asked me why I’m so irritated with young Jordan. Here’s why. Last week, she and her pal Geoffrey tweeted and retweeted their enthusiasm for “Vikileaks.” Given that both are former Ignatieff staffers, and given that I don’t recall either of them doing to their former boss what was now being done to Toews’ ex-wife, children, etc., I found that objectionable, and said so. They didn’t like that. They then took to retweeting stuff to get at someone close to me – stuff that was critical of Ontario’s Liberal government, to boot. And now, this morning, we have Jordan piously whinging about “cyber bullies.” She and her gaggle should take a long look in the mirror.

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I particularly like this screen cap the Sun folks used before my segment.

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Very, very powerful.

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The Citizen’s Dan Gardner and I, and precious few others, have been arguing for days that – however loathsome Vic Toews may be as a politician, and he is – it is unethical and unfair to dig for dirt in his divorce files. Among other things, it is unfair to his children and spouse, and exposes them to further pain and embarrassment.

Dan and I have been called every name in the book for the position we’ve taken. And otherwise sensible progressives have angrily defended “Vikileaks” for this loathsome invasion of privacy.

So here’s an idea: if you think what Vikileaks did is okay, will you agree to let me and a small opposition research team to go through your bankruptcy, mortgage, credit and other publicly-available records, and publish the results?  Your Internet activity, too.  When you post here, I get your IP address: we’ll use that to publicize where you go surfing on the Net.

There is much, much more readily available than you might think. We will then publish the results here and on Twitter, as Vikileaks did.

What say? Who’s game? This is a serious offer.  (I’d particularly like Jordan and Geoff to take me up on it, but I can guarantee you that they won’t.)

Come on, Toews-haters! You don’t have anything to hide, do you?

UPDATE: It’s two full hours since I posted this.  It’s odd, but no Toews-hating Liberals or New Democrats seem to want to take me up on the oppo offer, and let us plumb through, and publicize, the publicly-available material about them.  How interesting.

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