Friday, February 04, 2011

Cat for Christy no laughing matter

This is odd.
First, a cat belonging to a Christy Clark campaign worker joins the Liberal party.
The worker, when contacted by Justine Hunter of the Globe, initially claimed the membership belonged to a great aunt who lived with her. The campaign later told the truth and then claimed the cat membership was a prank by persons unknown.
George Abbott and Kevin Falcon condemned the cat sign-up; Abbott expressed concern about voter fraud in the leadership contest.
And a website - kitties4christy.com - mocked the whole thing.
Then Sean Holman revealed that the web domain name was registered on Feb. 1, three days before the story broke.
The Liberals are voting for the next leader by phone and online. Members who joined by today - Friday - will get a PIN and be eligible to cast a ballot. Falcon claims he's signed up 17,500 new members; Mike de Jong 10,000.
There is a large potential for voter fraud.
The Liberals are supposedly adopting a process that gives each riding 100 votes, no matter how many members it has. The votes would be allocated based on a constituency vote. That would reduce the impact of signing up thousands of new members, feline or otherwise.
That decision has to be confirmed at a convention next weekend and requires two-thirds support to pass. All candidates have said they support the change.
If it doesn't pass, then the legitimacy of new members is going to be a big issue.

Postscript:
The Abbott campaign confirmed in a statement that Campaign Research, a campaign management company in Toronto working as a contractor for his leadership bid, prepared the cat website.
"I have learned this afternoon that this website was created by a vendor who works for my campaign when they learned through the media that a story regarding Ms. Clark's campaign sign-ups was under development," Abbott said in the statement.
He had it taken down.
But they didn't sign the cat up, he said.

That raises other questions

5 comments:

  1. The cat might have been a better candidate than some of the Gordo clones running for the job. The sad thing is that whoever gets the nod to run the Liberal ship, also becomes Premier with no input from most of the province

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  2. Anonymous11:32 AM

    off topic - Kash Heed

    Andrew MacLeod reports in the Tyee that one of the panelists - Peter B. Lloyd - who investigated former independent prosecutor Terrence Robertson for not disclosing company donations to the BC Liberals... was... wait for it... was an officer in a company that donated to the BC Liberals ($7,500 in 2008).

    But wait there's more: another member of that esteemed Law Society panel was exMLA, past and current BC Liberal Claude Richmond.

    Wow! What a coincidence.

    TheTyee.ca

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  3. Anonymous8:19 AM

    Campbell's election lie, the BCR wasn't for sale. The other election lie, the HST wasn't on Campbell and Hansen's radar. Oh!! Along with the HST lie, was, BC had only a teeny provincial deficit. We know the Liberals, lie, deceive and cheat to win. The Liberals signing up their cats, is no surprise to me. For all we know, the 17,500 sign up, could be mostly cats. Campbell and the BC Liberals, are known for their dirty tactics. However, the cats would be a improvement, they don't lie.

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  4. Anonymous10:26 AM

    Does anyone know where any of candidates stand on any of the issues? We just get this blather but no info on issues.

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  5. May I suggest that most candidates for any party set up websites so that's the place to start looking.

    ReplyDelete