There is a judicial remedy for electoral fraud — a judge can overturn an election result in a given riding.
The last one was in 1990, when Maurizio Bevilacqua’s first election in 1988 was overturned by a judge. (Wikipedia has a list of every by-election since 1897 or so.)
Ones before that were in 1969, 1957, 1950, 1943, 1933, 1923, 1913, 1912, 1909, 1906 (x4!), 1905, 1904, 1903, 1902 (x3), 1901 (x3), 1897 (x8), and many during the Macdonald years. (Which Wikipedia didn’t catalogue.)
Funnily, the last time a non-Liberal was the challenged victor was in 1923.
Update: My take?
Even if every accusation were true in the robo-call scandal, I think we’d only get one or two by-elections out of it.
Basically, if I’m Ted Opitz, I’m nervous. That’s it.
Update again: The Toronto Star, before it tries to lay blame anyway, does agree with my intuition –
When Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he had no knowledge of dirty trick “robocalls” used to mislead voters in the 2011 federal election, Canadians should take him at his word. The crude effort to direct opposition party voters to wrong polling locations, perhaps in as many as 27 ridings, doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a competent strategy. Almost guaranteed to backfire, it was — in a word — stupid.
Yep.
