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“Todd was not involved in the day to day management of the campaign, that was his campaign team,” said Fassbender. “As soon as he found out there was an issue he asked, and the team had already started to, dive into the issue.”

At a subsequent meeting with the party’s rules committee, the party deemed the memberships invalid, and the Stone campaign agreed to remove them.

“Our understanding at that time was these were real people who had paid their membership, but there was something that didn’t comply with the standards the party had set for emails,” said Fassbender.

The core of the allegations against Stone relate to his campaign allegedly registering domain names that it would use to then create numerous fake email addresses, which it would then assign to new members when registering them with the party. If true, the move could have theoretically allowed the Stone campaign to control registration on behalf of those members, collect their personal identification numbers from the party, and even vote on their behalf, which is not allowed under party rules.

Fassbender said it didn’t get that far, because the emails were flagged before any PINs were issued or any votes cast.

The disclosure raises questions about why Stone has spent several days publicly claiming his campaign had no more memberships disqualified than any other campaign, when it clearly had significant internal issues.

The party instituted stricter rules in 2017 to prevent against bulk voting because in the 2011 leadership race won by Christy Clark the problem was so widespread that some campaigns were hosting “PIN parties” where they would mass vote on behalf of voters whose ID numbers they’d obtained. That prompted complaints by some members who went to vote only to discover their PINs had already been used to cast ballots for somebody else.