Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Susan Delacourt notes that while the NDP's leadership convention points out some of the risks of online voting, the real problem lies in the people working to block democracy through any available means:

While those who use computers have become accustomed to the system-fail message about files being corrupted, we’re talking here about a different type of corruption.

The cyberattack on the NDP was apparently deliberate and orchestrated. As well, it’s looking like the ever-widening robo-calls investigation will reveal something a little larger than mere, one-off mischief.

The worry is that it isn’t the machinery that’s getting corrupted, but some of the people plying the political trade right now. If that’s the case, more than the system needs a reset — and smashing the machines won’t fix it.

And Dave reaches a similar conclusion while noting that the Cons' vote suppression looks to have been the result of an organizational push:

Perhaps it's decades of military training and my experience as a front-line "death technician" that routes my thinking, but I cannot think of any way to pull off a geographically massive, narrowly timed operation without at least four things in place: planning, coordination, deception and delegation1. In a criminal enterprise it is described with one word: conspiracy.
...
All the signs point to a planned, coordinated and specifically-timed national effort to suppress the opposition vote using illegal means. And to add to the elements required to pull off something as large as this appears to be, the direction of such an effort has to come from well up in the hierarchy of a group. In a disciplined, authoritarian-led organization, independent action over a wide scale usually fails.

Meanwhile, the Hill Times reports on Marc Mayrand's recommendations to improve the Canada Elections Act, while Sixth Estate suggests fully enforcing the one we have already.

- Julie MacArthur aptly sums up the Cons' idea of a message on the environment as being that of a "scorched earth hour".

- fern hill (X2, deBeauxOs, JJ and Alison are rightly asking for some progressive unity against Stephen Woodworth's attempts to reopen the abortion debate.

- Finally, John Geddes and Aaron Wherry look behind the scenes of the NDP leadership campaign, while Alice thoroughly dissects the final voting numbers.