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People who received the calls report that the callers would phone repeatedly, irritating the recipients, and then speak to them rudely.

Volunteers on local Liberal campaigns, often amateurs, were confused when they received complaints from supporters, and the party did not counter the tactics or record instances in a systematic way.

Whoever was organizing the calls appears to have been working from lists of Liberal supporters, which could have been compiled through voter-identification calls that all the parties use.

The Conservatives are particularly adept at tracking voters in every riding using a centralized database called CIMS (Constituent Information Management System), with the name and numbers of identified Conservative supporters and opponents alike. Local campaigns are given access to CIMS.

Some Liberals also suspect that someone with access to their lists may have given or sold numbers to the callers.

The deceptive live calls were all made into ridings where Liberals and Conservatives were in tight races, but there were no such calls in some of the ridings that the Conservatives were working hard to take from the Liberals.

High-profile Liberal MPs at the top of Conservatives’ target list — such as Ruby Dhalla and Mark Holland — were not targeted.

But from the beginning of the election, campaign staff working for Joe Volpe, in the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence, were hearing reports from Liberal supporters about strange phone calls.