Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 7/3/2012 (3127 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

The question isn't why it happened, but rather why did it take so long to happen?

The federal political arena continues to suffer seismic tremors from the allegation the Conservative party organized a malicious automated-phone campaign to direct voters to the wrong polling stations on election day last May. Targeting voters unlikely to support the Conservatives, the campaign was allegedly key in suppressing the anti-Tory vote in closely fought ridings. The theory, still unproven, is this manipulation resulted in the Tories winning a majority government.

As the narrative of this story has unfolded, we're all learning about modern campaign tactics and technology. That "voter-suppression" tactics are just as important as "voter-identification" tactics. And, that managed meticulously, almost any citizen with enough money can anonymously corrupt an election. It's a frightening realization, and one that experienced campaign organizers have predicted for some time.

"I know a lot of people who have said for years, 'You know, with a prepaid credit card and a burner cellphone, you could really cause a lot of trouble,' " said Robert Ermel, head of the University of Manitoba's Institute of Policy Research and a former Liberal campaign architect. "You don't need ID to get the card or the phone. You don't need ID to set up an account with a call centre. You don't have to provide your real name, or your address. And you can broadcast almost any message to thousands of people for pennies."

Ermel said it can cost as little as 10 cents to do an automated-message blast to a single constituency. If you want to hit 15,000 homes, that would cost $1,500, which is chump change for a local or national campaign. And the best part is, nobody ever has to know exactly who paid for the calls.

Although Elections Canada is nowhere near the end of its investigation, it's clear at least some of the phone calls sending voters to the wrong polling stations were generated by a call-centre account opened by the tragically named "Pierre Poutine," who also used an anonymous PayPal account to pay for the phone blast and made contact with the call centre using a disposable cellphone.

These details boost suspicion this was the work of a group of third-party, political civilians, rather than official campaign operatives.

"What if you had a group of well-heeled supporters who didn't like the limits on donations to political parties, and had money to spend to help get their party elected?" said Ermel. "What if they threw a bunch of money into a pot and paid for a phone blast? They could cause all kinds of trouble and be virtually untouchable."

This is the doomsday scenario among campaign technologists and strategists: a well-funded, sophisticated, untraceable effort by a faceless cabal bent on perverting the electoral system. In the United States, the allegedly independent Super PACs spend millions and millions of dollars supporting certain candidates and assailing others out in the open. But at least they do it out in the open. In Canada, as we're seeing with robocalls, technology has created fertile ground for wealthy, motivated third parties to pervert democracy deep underground.

If this turns out to be the case, then there is only one remaining way any registered political party could be tied to the robocalls. Although setting up a call-centre account and uploading a voice file with the phone-message blast is easy and anonymous, it is a virtually useless gesture unless you have information on which voters to target. You'd need to know exactly which voters had voted for another party, or were likely to vote for another party. And information like that could only be found in the voter-identification database of a registered political party.

Every party in this country maintains a computerized database of voters in every riding. It includes details on who votes and who doesn't, who has self-identified as a supporter and who self-identifies as supporters of other parties. These are lists that have been built up over years and years of voter-identification grunt work, along with lists of enumerated voters provided by Elections Canada.

The Tory Constituency Information Management System (CIMS) is considered to be the most detailed, most technologically sophisticated of any database maintained by any party. Ermel said it is almost certain there is a record of who viewed or downloaded voter-identification data from CIMS, and ultimately, Elections Canada will have to examine those records to see if they match robocall patterns.

Election Canada's investigation will likely take months, if not longer, to complete. It may well be we won't know well into the next pre-election cycle whether there is a fire worthy of all this smoke. But there certainly is a lot of smoke, and the majority of it is hovering over the governing party.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca