Prior to the 2011 federal election fraud/robocalls scandal, few Canadians had ever heard of CIMS, the Conservative Party of Canada’s national permanent voter-tracking database, or its close relationship to Responsive Marketing Group or RMG, the Conservatives' main GOTV phone bank and fundraising company used in that election by the CPC national campaign and 97 individual Conservative candidates.
Canadians did not know that the Conservative Party paid RMG $1.4million and provided them with a CIMS voters list and a script for its call centre employees to read to voters. That script, according to Canada Elections investigators, read in part :
“Elections Canada has changed some voting locations at the last moment. To be sure, could you tell me the address of where you’re voting.”
This last in direct contravention of Elections Canada's request that "users of the dataset of all polling sites respect the following restrictions: that the dataset be used for internal purposes only; that it not be used to inform voters of their voting location."
As it happens, the percentage of voting stations across Canada that changed location in the final week of the election was just 0.003.
In their section on RMG in the 2014 Summary Investigation Report on Robocalls, Elections Canada reported that investigators who listened to the recorded live calls noted that “RMG provided wrong poll location information in 27% of the cases involving complainants.”
“In some cases the difference was a few kilometres; in several cases the difference was more than 100 kilometres. The furthest location, provided to an elector called twice by RMG, was 740 kilometres from the correct location.”
“From April 29 to May 1, 2011, returning officers in 11 electoral districts reported elector complaints of incorrect poll location information coming from Conservative Party callers. When contacted by returning officers, local Conservative Party campaigns advised that the calls were from the national campaign of the party, and that the campaigns could not stop them.”
“Investigators were told by the Conservative Party national campaign chair that Elections Canada had no authority to limit a party's use of the poll location data.”
The Conservative Party’s partnership with RMG dates back to 2003 when RMG founder and president Michael Davis pitched the idea of a fundraising machine attached to a national permanent CIMS database to Stephen Harper's mentor Tom Flanagan.
Mike Harris strategist Stewart Braddick came on board to head up Target Outreach, an affilliate firm providing "fundraising and direct voter contact solutions to U.S. Right of Centre Political Organizations".
Greg Kaufman signed up with RMG in 2007. From his bio at RMG parent group iMarketing Solutions, where he became Chief Knowledge Officer in 2010 :
Greg Kaufman signed up with RMG in 2007. From his bio at RMG parent group iMarketing Solutions, where he became Chief Knowledge Officer in 2010 :
"Greg has extensive experience in IT management. For six years, he worked for the Ontario PC Party as part of the IT / Direct Voter Contact Team. There, he helped develop CIMS, a revolutionary political database tool that is in wide use today.
Following his time with the Ontario PC Party, Greg spent three years working for Elections Ontario as a manager in the register division, where he compiled and managed the Provincial Voters List."
Flanagan : “CIMS provided a receptacle for the hundreds of thousands of records generated by RMG’s large-scale calling programs.”
In 2009 Preston Manning at the Manning Centre for Building Democracy presented RMG founder Michael Davis with the Manning Centre Pyramid Award for Political Technology, “recognizing RMG's role in helping to build the conservative movement in Canada” :
“Since its inception, RMG has raised more than $75 million for right of centre causes in Canada, and helped to elect hundreds of 'right of centre' politicians at municipal, provincial and national levels."
In March 2010 RMG parent company iMarketing Solutions merged with Xentel, a company with an alarming history of lawsuits on both sides of the Canada/US border over its fundraising practices. That year they spent $1,839,000 on equipment to update their dialing platform and another $1,453,000 in 2011.
In the first quarter after the 2011 election, iMarketing Solutions posted $24M in revenue, but according to their Canadian Stock Exchange statement : "For the year ended December 31, 2011, the Company had a loss of $5,253,000."
A 2012 legal challenge supported by the Council of Canadians was based in part on the affidavit of Annette Desgagne, a RMG call centre worker who reported that three days before the 41st federal election she and her co-workers were given scripts to mislead voters on election day into going to the wrong location to vote.
From the Desgagne 2012 affidavit :
“The new scripts we were to read did not identify that we were calling on behalf of the Conservative Party nor did we mention the local Conservative candidate. The new script, as far as I can recall, was as follows: “Hello. My name is Annette Desgagne. I am calling from the Voter Outreach Centre. Elections Canada has made some last minute changes to the polling stations.”
RMG CEO Andrew Langhorne, a former election campaign worker for Stephen Harper and seven years a Director of Voter Contact and Information Management for Premier Mike Harris and the Ontario PC Party, filed an affidavit in August calling Desgagne's affidavit "categorically false".
The plaintiffs' suit to overturn election results in six ridings was unsuccessful and the court ascribed no blame to RMG.
Four months later on April 8 2013, RMG announced it was closing its call centres and laying off call centre employees, and four days after that iMarketing Solutions and all its 18 Canadian and American subsidiaries filed for bankruptcy protection in Canada and the US.
At the time they owed the Canadian federal government $1 million in unpaid taxes.
CEO Andrew Langhorne was sanguine :
“The nature of our business often necessitates ramping work up and down based on business requirements.”
Households across Canada from Ottawa to BC reported receiving their calls beginning in December.
Port Alberni municipal councillor Chris Alemany got a call on August 4 :
“Hi, this is the Voter Outreach Centre for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. We would like to know if we can count on your support for Stephen Harper in the upcoming election”His wife picked up another call 11 days later :
"Hi, this is _name of person_ with the Voter Outreach Centre. We would like to know if we can count on your vote for Stephen Harper in the upcoming election."Councillor Alemany : "Note the difference from my call? They didn’t specifically identify the Voter Outreach Centre as being a part of the Stephen Harper campaign."
A new script or a bit of free lancing on the part of the call centre employee?
Either way, they did mention Steve in there so it's all still legal.
Operators are standing by...
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6 comments:
I just realized, never having gotten a misleading phone call like that, one of the many benefits of living on a rural Gulf Island: there's only so many places to set up a voting place, all in the "Downtown" which everyone has to pass if, as we're unlikely to hear, any of them have been misdirected off-Island to cast their vote.
Unless one of the candidates leaves his (they're all males in my riding) name on the ballot after dropping out too late to have it removed, we shouldn't have to worry unduly about misinfo-robo-calls here.
Lucky as we are here, I understand the evil machine has been wound up, ready for this year's election.
Is it true that Elections Canada isn't now allowed, as per the bullshit "Fair" Elections Act, to advertise that it never changes voting places at last-minute?
Scotty : From the 2011 federal election :
"The voice at the other end of Ken Hancock’s telephone line on Election Day 2011 sounded official enough.
It was a woman who claimed to be calling from the Conservative Party of Canada telling Hancock that his voting location had been changed from the usual location — a local school not far from his Pender Island, B.C., home — to the municipality of Saanich on Vancouver Island.
The supposed new location meant that Hancock would have to drive to the ferry dock at Otter Bay on the northwest side of Pender Island, take a 40-minute ferry ride south to Vancouver Island, and then drive another 30 kilometres to Saanich to cast his ballot.
“It was very strange,” Hancock told the Star Tuesday. “When I started asking her questions, she shut me down pretty quickly and actually hung up.”
Don't know the answer to your question re Elections Canada so will inquire and get back to you. Either way, safe to assume getting this kind of info out is probably down to us voters now.
The .003 voting place changes in the last week of the last election were done by local DROs because of things like power outages and such. There was no excuse to phone thousands of voters who had no such polling station changes.
Notable that this was perhaps the first time a federal party asked for locations of all polling stations, when previously EC only gave info re local locations to local candidates. In summary report, EC commish wrote that after what happened, he would not be complying with this request again.
Great work dredging this up Alison. Hopefully the campaign results aren't affected by these scum.
Great research, Alison. I love how Canada paid these scam artists an extra million in lost taxation revenue.
Funny how we were all supposed to be happy with the RackNine Sona Prescott story confined to just one riding with missing CIMS data when even in that riding RMG and its partnership with CIMS was the bigger player.
Holly Stick here
Hi Alison, just FYI I saw tonight that apparently SixthEstate is starting a new blog:
http://jobsfolly.blogspot.ca/
Also tweeting a bit:
https://twitter.com/sixthestate/with_replies
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