The Canadian Federal Election of 2011 was tarnished by a minor scandal that in some parts of the country became, at least in terms

of perception, substantially more than minor. During this election, a series of robocalls were made

to voters, primarily to voters who were on a voting demographics list, indicating that they would likely not be voting for the Conservative Party.

And those calls contained messages telling the recipients that their voting location had changed.

These calls were focused on the Guelph, Ontario, electoral district, but it was later revealed that similar calls were received

in 247 of Canada's 308 writings, which is what their electoral districts are called, during that

election. Now, because of who was on the receiving end of these calls, people who were designated as non-conservative

party supporters, the Canadian Conservative Party and Prime Minister Stephen Harper were questioned,

but they all claimed to have no knowledge of this effort. It was also posited that in some of these

areas, particularly those where the final vote counts, were very close.

These misinformation-bearing phone calls could have swayed the outcome of the vote in a

statistically relevant way. Whether or not that's actually the case, of course, it's difficult to say.

What we do know, though, is that after three years of investigation,

a federal court judge found that election fraud had taken place in six writings across the

country. And he also found that none of the Conservative Party leadership or candidates were

involved. He did, however, find that the former director of communications for the

conservative candidate in Guelph, a man named Michael Sona, was guilty of, quote,

willfully preventing or endeavoring to prevent an elector from voting, end quote. In 2014,

Sona was sentenced to nine months in jail and 12 months of probation.

Interestingly, although Sona was the only person to be found guilty for this scandal,

most of the investigators and the justice who presided over his trial

indicated that they believed he had not acted alone. They didn't have enough

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