It was sometime after 9:30, when woman came up to my table and explained to me that while this was her polling place, she had just gotten a phone call at home that told her she needed to go to a new polling place downtown.
In brief, months after the election, two investigative reporters for two Ottawa papers uncovered a scheme to misdirect voters in dozens of ridings to the wrong polling place.
It’s also worth noting that according to some analysis, it seemed unlikely that Sona had the access to play the part he was convicted of playing in the scheme as it was laid out in the agreed upon facts of the case.
Imagine for a minute that Eliot Ness didn’t arrest Al Capone, or that Capone associates like Frank Nitti or Louis Campagna also went free.
Let’s consider too that electoral fraud has gotten more technologically sophisticated in the years since the robocall.
With a pre-paid cell phone, a vanilla credit card, and a fake name, a small group of people were able to create widespread disruption in a Federal election without needing to hack a damn thing.
I think it’s safe to say that the people behind robocalls in 2011 decided that getting away with a crime once is not worth testing fate for a second crime spree, but this was still a crime that happened, and almost no one was punished for it.
Famously, the nom de guerre of the robocall mastermind was Pierre Poutine, and you may not remember that there was once a poutinerie downtown called Pierre’s Poutine.