No matter what the Harpers or the Del Mastros say ...

It is bovine coprology. (Yes, yes. Look it up).

Via Greg we are reminded that the denials of Harper and any of his goons is fiction based on fiction. The facts were there on election day.

Voters in ridings across Canada are being warned not to trust calls telling them to go to different polling stations, according to Elections Canada.

Elections Canada has had reports from several ridings from voters in Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia who claim to have been given false information that directed them to the wrong place to vote.

Written not this past week but on 2 May, 2011 - The date of the last federal election.

Do you think there wasn't a strategy debrief in the Harper campaign structure which looked at this within a few days after the election?

They've known about this all along, and at the highest levels. This would have been highlighted on the daily news budget which makes its way through government offices.

Complaints were coming in from three provinces, then.

The thing is, it was hardly the first time and it wasn't just that election.What happened in the 2008 election was very close to home.

Briony Penn, who was the Liberal candidate for Saanich-Gulf Islands in that election, could have comfortably run under any party banner, except the Harper Conservatives. As an adjunct professor at UVic she had an impressive environmental track record which attracted positive attention from voters who leaned Liberal, Green or NDP. The long and short of it is that she was a serious threat to the Harper incumbent, Gary Lunn.

If you sounded out the riding at the time you would have found that Lunn was largely viewed as a non-entity who people were happy to toss-out if somebody better came along. Lunn had embarrassed himself as Minister of Natural Resources when he fired Linda Keen, then head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, just nine months prior to the election.

Briony Penn was looking good to a lot of people. Solid environmental credentials, provincial Green Party member, running for a centrist party.

Then the NDP candidate imploded. Here we'll take a look at what Lawrence Martin has to say: (Emphasis mine)

Midway through that campaign, Julian West, the NDP candidate, dropped out owing to revelations of a public nudity scandal from years earlier. But his withdrawal didn’t come in time to get his name off the ballot.

The federal election was on Oct. 14. At dinnertime on Oct. 13, an automated phone message went out urging constituents, strangely enough, to vote for Mr. West. And it appeared to have some effect: He received 3,667 votes, almost 6 per cent of the total. A poll a few days earlier had showed him at 1 per cent. This was good news for Mr. Lunn. The bulk of those votes might otherwise have gone to the Liberal candidate, who lost to Mr. Lunn by 2,625 votes.

Yup. I know about that Oct. 13th robocall personally. Around here nobody believes for a minute that it was anybody but the Conservative who initiated that call. Given the cost, they were the only ones who stood to gain by having people vote for a non-existent NDP candidate. The NDP had shut down their campaign office in the riding.

What it did show though, is that it worked. Elizabeth May, now the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands believes it may have been a pilot project of the Harper Conservatives. Worse, however, is that Elections Canada, when faced with evidence of voter suppression, dropped the investigation. That would encourage anybody intent on violating election law to do it again. Not only did it produce the desired result but it proved that complaints would be dropped as fast as they were made.

And again from Martin:

Mr. (Byng) Giraud, the Lunn campaign manager, was categorical: “Nobody has ever asked me to do dirty tricks.” But it’s conceivable they were done without his knowledge. The party had a separate team, he said, that worked on swing ridings. It’s also possible the Conservatives weren’t the source at all.

Hold it a minute. At the time, anybody who was watching the Lunn campaign knew that there was another person involved. Bruce Hallsor. Neither he nor Giraud can claim election process cleanliness. Hallsor organized some pretty thready 3rd party funding groups for Lunn's campaign. These two can, in keeping with the Harperite standard practice, deny, deny, deny all they want and there is no substantive reason to believe them.