A look into the election in Canada after Trump tweeted at the voting machines – National

Canada watched the election as social media posts from Canadians began to wonder if the last federal election had been rigged by suspicious voting machines.

These tweets were accompanied by unconfirmed claims from the US election and from President Donald Trump and his allies that automatic voting tables were blamed for the loss to Joe Biden.

On November 16, the company tweeted how it uses only hand-counted paper ballots in an effort to educate Canadians.

On Nov. 17, Trump turned the tweet upside down, citing evidence of a conspiracy against him.

“This is unfortunate, it is not intentional,” Chief Electoral Officer Stephen Perrall responded to an email with Trump’s tweet.

This email contains three dozen pages of documents about social media posts received by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

Many parts of the documents have been obscured, citing officials deleting names as important advice to senior officials or for privacy reasons.

From what is available, it seems that the look for the tweet began on November 9 with discussions about how to respond to concerns about the voting machines used in the November 9 US presidential election.

Canadian officials said machines created by Dominion voting systems used by many Canadian social media users in the US election were also used here. One document notes that some believe the results of the last election were “illegal.”

“Users participating in those discussions will point to the fact that the machines were used or used to count votes, adding to the already corrupt system and leading to bad results,” says one document.

“Most users (Election Canada) appreciate providing factual information and that information is used to respond to misleading posts.”

In fact, what the agency tried to do during the US presidential election was to explain the voting system in Canada, especially the mail-in votes that were in high demand south of the border as a result of the epidemic.

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Automated schedules for elections are not used at the federal level, but those prepared by Dominion voting systems were used in a leadership race: Justin Trudeau became Liberal leader.

The first tweet about automatic voting machines was on November 12th.

Four days later, the company tweeted again, “We use hand-counted paper ballots in front of analysts, never using voting machines or electronic tables to count votes in our 100-year history.”

The next day, at 4:10 pm, an internal email made this post “a lot of positive contacts” and “a lot of new followers”.

Read the email that “the team does a great job of staying above all interactions,” which eventually went to Perrault.

The team’s work was in full swing when the president pressed the retweet button 29 minutes later.

“It says it all!” Trump wrote a letter to his 88.5 million followers at 4:39 p.m.

Six media requests landed in the next 45 minutes. As online responses from social media users proliferated, emails began to land in Peralt’s inbox.

Someone said, “Way to go, you’re on the internet!” With two smiley faces. Another from a Liberal Party official – the name has been changed, but “? “I thought you might appreciate Trump’s shout,” Perrault tweeted.

Perrault’s response to the latter email was an abbreviated version he sent after 6:18 p.m.

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“Yes, this is very unfortunate and not intentional: our social media team simply answered a series of questions and misleading stories about how we use Dominion,” Perrault responded to the post.

“We have nothing against Dominion (or it’s a guaranteed schedule). Dominion voting and EMBs 1/8 Electoral systems rely on them 3/8.

In the days following Peralt’s or election Canada’s handling of questions about Trump and the election, the message, designed on November 17, came in some form: this message is used in federal elections “intended to inform” people who “mistakenly believe” voting machines in the federal election, read a draft response to Peralt’s review, ” Nothing else should be considered. ”

The documentation also shows a detailed evaluation of the contacts viewed online, and it responds with specific lines.

“Elections Canada seeks to be a reliable source of information about the federal election process,” the agency said in a statement.

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“When we notice misinformation on social media, our social media team works with the agency’s material experts to design messages to counter that misinformation.”