David and EVERY potential FEDERAL voter ACROSS Canada. Do we need a Prime Minister and a Government who is as great, or a greater DECEIVER than Putin and who will do and SAY anything to stay in POWER??? I dont! PLEASE READ the following-PLEASE! . Author of report touted by Poilievre contradicts minister on voter fraud The Canadian PressBy Joan Bryden, The Canadian Press | The Canadian Press – 1 hour 1 minute ago. OTTAWA - The author of a report cited repeatedly to justify cracking down on potential voter fraud says the Harper government is misrepresenting his report and ignoring his recommendations. Indeed, Harry Neufeld says theres not a shred of evidence that there have been more than a handful of cases of deliberate voter fraud in either federal or provincial elections. I never said there was voter fraud, Neufeld said in an interview with The Canadian Press. Nor did the Supreme Court, who looked at this extremely carefully. Neufeld said the governments efforts to prevent voter fraud are aimed at a non-existent problem. And he predicted theyll wind up disenfranchising thousands of voters and resulting in a rash of court challenges. The former chief electoral officer for British Columbia was commissioned by Elections Canada to review the problem of non-compliance with the rules for casting ballots after a challenge to the 2011 results in the Toronto riding of Etobicoke Centre disclosed numerous irregularities. That case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which last year rejected a bid by the failed Liberal candidate to overturn the results. Pierre Poilievre, the minister for democratic reform, has repeatedly cited Neufelds report to justify two controversial provisions in his bill to overhaul the Canada Elections Act: prohibiting voter information cards as a valid piece of identification and ending the practice of allowing people to vouch for voters who do not have the proper identification documents. He referred to the report again Thursday in response to chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand, who told a Commons committee earlier in the day that the vast majority of the irregularities identified by Neufeld were mistakes by election officials in administering oaths and filling out the vouching paperwork. This gives me occasion to correct the explicit factual error in the CEOs testimony when he said that the errors linked to vouching were strictly record-keeping that would not compromise an election, Poilievre told the House of Commons. This is what page 10 of his own report says: The Supreme Court made it clear that such errors in other circumstances could contribute to a court overturning an election. That sounds pretty serious to me. But Neufeld said Poilievre is being selective in his reading of the report and urged him to read it in its entirety. Hes a bright guy, obviously. He can read and, you know, he should go to the recommendations and he should look at the entire context of the issues that were behind the problems with vouching. In his report, Neufeld estimated that an average of 500 serious administrative errors were committed in each of the countrys 308 ridings. Serious errors of a type the courts consider irregularities that can contribute to an election being overturned were found to occur in 12 per cent of all election day cases involving voter registration and 42 per cent of cases involving identity vouching, he reported. Neufeld concluded there were multiple causes for the errors, including complexity, supervision, recruitment (of poll officials), training, updating the list of electors. At no point did he suggest ineligible voters were deliberately trying to cast illegal ballots. Neufeld recommended that voter information cards should be more widely allowed as valid pieces of i.d. And he recommended that the vouching process and paperwork should be simplified and elections officials better trained to avoid irregularities in future. In the Etobicoke Centre case, Neufeld noted in the interview that the Supreme Court specifically said there was no evidence of deliberate voter fraud. Nevertheless, he said enduring urban myths abound about voter fraud. For decades, hes heard stories about busloads of out-of-riding people arriving at polling stations to vote illegally or nefarious individuals scooping up dozens of discarded voter information cards in apartment building lobbies and using them to orchestrate illegal voting schemes. Conservative MP Brad Butt last month claimed several times to have personally witnessed the latter scheme but, after Elections Canada began investigating his claim, he eventually apologized and clarified that he was recounting anecdotal stories. You hear it so often, I think some people believe it, said Neufeld, who has 33 years of experience overseeing elections. I dont believe it. Ive heard it from politicians and Ive said to them, Please, provide me some evidence ... Never, never a single shred of evidence has been provided. Like Mayrand, Neufeld said he fears Poilievres efforts to prevent voter fraud will end up disenfranchising people who have trouble producing identification with proof of their address — primarily students, seniors, the poor and aboriginals. He predicted that the bill will eventually lead to court challenges by those deprived of their fundamental democratic right to cast ballots. I think we would see a huge outpouring of absolute anger because my experience is, when people are denied the right to vote and they feel theyre legitimately qualified and that theres not a good basis for denying them that vote, they get very angry, he said. And I would not be surprised if there was a rash of court challenges from people following the (next) election if Bill C-23 goes through the way it is. If the Conservatives argument about the threat of voter fraud is accepted, Neufeld said hes worried that the government will eventually move to eliminate other special balloting procedures, such as voting by mail or registering at the time of voting, and impose more and more identification requirements, such as proof of citizenship. The argument doesnt have any logical, factual grounding but, nevertheless, it keeps being used and I think its a slippery slope to say, Oh yeah, we cant trust anyone, we gotta have them prove everything in terms of eligibility before we give them a ballot.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 12:24:17 +0000
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