May 23, 2014

i just watched a little report on the national about how the robocall scandal never happened, and it was just blown out of proportion by the media. this was filmed after the government came out with a report indicating that they couldn't find evidence of the claims.

well, that's government investigating government, and i have reason to believe it's being covered up. how much of an effect it actually had is a more complicated question that i can't begin to try and answer.

however, i was working for one of the robocall firms on election day. it was a small office out of a tall building on elgin street in ottawa. i initially started working there doing opinion surveys as a student, but i found myself going back there between jobs because they were happy to have me back. i happen to have been rather good at getting people to answer the surveys (i guess it's a combination of being interesting enough to not hang up on and being a good troll), which is an obscure and sought after talent.

anyways, the nature of the firm changed over the five or so years i was in and out of it. they were initially doing overflow for ekos or doing a lot of government of canada surveys. over time, they started doing more and more surveys for conservative political candidates. for the last several months leading up to the election, they were pretty much campaigning for the conservative party.

some of the polls were pretty straight forward - which candidate in your riding do you support, followed by some demographics about age and income. some of them were a little less straight forward, and i had caught on that something was not right by the end of it.

for example, they were polling in helena guergis' riding, but they weren't refreshing the numbers. so, you'd have people calling the same numbers over and over again, supposedly on behalf of helena guergis. that's a good way to piss people off so that they don't want to vote for helena guergis, which is what the cpc wanted at the time.

i was taken off the phone on election day to do data entry, but i do distinctly recall the *owner* of the firm periodically repeating - and it was of the utmost importance to him - to NOT tell people there was a change in the riding, because the information was false. i didn't put it together at the time, but it seems like he was actually NOT wanting to commit voter fraud, no doubt to try and protect his business' reputation.

holinshed closed it's doors almost immediately after the election and has not resurfaced since.

the people on the phone were not robots, although they may have sounded like robots from time to time.