“It’s not difficult to buy a Smartphone that’s called a burner that isn’t tied to a company and you’re buying time with cards…you load a list on it. That burner then just automatically, with software, calls out the 5,000 people you are trying to perhaps suppress,” explained one longtime Liberal organizer, who did not want to be identified.
That phone could deliver a message to supporters of a political opponent giving them false information, as in the robocalls scandal, or it could slander the other candidate anonymously, he said.
“If you’re Elections Canada, how on earth do you monitor that? You don’t,” said the organizer.
Elections Canada is currently investigating the so-called “robocalls” affair, the automated and live fraudulent calls made in the last election, to send voters to the wrong polling stations. Elections Canada is looking into 1,100 complaints about misleading calls made in the last election and Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand told MPs in May that Elections Canada may recommend the government regulate contact with voters during election campaigns. Mr. Mayrand also said Elections Canada’s next report will look into how new technology affects campaigning. Mr. Mayrand said the report will be presented by the end of this fiscal year next spring.
“The purposed of this report will be to suggest improvements to the Canada Elections Act in order to deal with a number of issues relating to new technologies and social media, as well as to how political entities communicate with electors during a general election,” Mr. Mayrand said before the House Affairs Committee on May 29. “Among other things, it will address issues such as voter contacts, either through automated or live calls, and whether, or to what extent, these communications need to be regulated.”
Meanwhile, last week the Federal Court decided to allow a challenge to proceed in seven ridings across the country regarding the 2011 election results. Backed by the Council of Canadians, the voters want the Federal Court to overturn the election results in the seven ridings won by Conservatives because of allegations of misleading phone calls that attempted to send voters to the wrong polling stations.
As well, the Supreme Court heard a separate case challenging last year’s election result in Etobicoke Centre, where Conservative MP Ted Opitz was elected by a margin of 26 votes. An Ontario Superior Court judge had ruled that 79 voters in the 2011 election were able to cast ballots though there were errors in their eligibility paperwork, or those documents were missing.
Today, there are a number of ways to contact voters, whether through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare or through automated phone calls or telephone town halls enabled by voice over internet protocol, or mass emails and text messages.
There are also updates that enable old tactics to be done more efficiently. For instance, when automated phone dialing first became available, the dialing system had to have its own phone line, and it dialed phone numbers one after another. With VOIP, thousands of calls can be placed simultaneously, delivering an automated message to thousands of listeners at a time.
Most of the technologies are developed in the U.S. where super-sized campaign budgets drive innovation.
“There are more new technologies coming online every campaign,” said a senior Conservative volunteer and activist who has worked on federal and provincial campaigns and who did not want to be identified.
During an election, parties put their efforts into building a list of known or potential supporters and keeping that list updated. Elections Canada provides candidates and parties with copies of its own voter lists, and campaigns constantly update them throughout the election.
Access to these electronic lists, which contain basic information on voters’ identities, is supposed to be tightly controlled, but in reality that rarely happens, said the Liberal organizer.
He said that with an average of four parties running in each of Canada’s 308 electoral districts, “there will literally be 10,000 people who have their hands” on it. What happens to the list from there is up to the ethics of each of those individuals.
“If you want to send out spam or an email message to 2,000 people… to misinform them about a candidate, it is not expensive and probably would take you about 20 minutes to figure our how to go offshore, have somebody send the email for you to that list and never be tracked,” he said.
The Liberal organizer also noted that while parties try to keep the list secure by limiting access to it and assigning access levels to those who can log into it, the system isn’t foolproof.
The senior Conservative activist said that the parties have a strong incentive to make sure that the list isn’t misused because access to this key tool could be taken away.
But to find those who do break the rules is exceedingly hard, said the Liberal.
“It’s incredibly expensive and time-consuming,” he said.
“Elections Canada would have to be able to forensically audit thousands of not only communications traditionally…but there’s 20 mediums out there,” he explained.
It’s also not in Elections Canada’s job description to monitor the way political parties engage with the electorate, said the Conservative source.
Tyler Sommers, coordinator of government watchdog group Democracy Watch, said he was concerned with how the latest in voter contact technology was being misused.
But “it’s not really Elections Canada’s job to keep up with that. It’s the Members of Parliament who are supposed to pass legislation in order to deal with that,” he said.
The Liberal source said that Elections Canada would have to be given the “resources and the technology and the legislation necessary to audit communications that are being misused.”
The Conservative source said that it’s clear that Elections Canada is conducting investigations and trying to make improvements, but the Liberal wasn’t as optimistic.
“What is understood among most political operatives is that Elections Canada historically has demonstrated little interest in severely punishing or in exacting more skin out of people who are found to be guilty,” said the Liberal.
“Unless people start to get charged, and there’s some accountability, this will get worse before it gets better,” he added.
Mr. Sommers said that Elections Canada already has sweeping powers to conduct investigations, and call witnesses, but that it’s impossible to know how strictly or loosely it enforces the Canada Elections Act because the results of their investigations remain private.
Elections Canada has received 3,000 complaints since 1997, he noted.
The organization’s budget will decline from $136.2-million to $94.8-million a year by 2014-2015 due to the wind down of certain programs and budget cuts, but Elections Canada also has the ability to draw straight from the government’s bank account when it comes to funding elections or investigations.
“Elections Canada’s operating reductions will have no impact on investigations by the Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections,” said spokesperson Diane Benson.
The agency is also reviewing the procedures used to ensure the integrity of the electoral system.
“Elections Canada is always looking for ways to improve the administration of the electoral system and is committed to working with Parliament to address any issues of concern,” said Ms. Benson.
Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis (Scarborough-Agincourt, Ont.) was recently in Libya where he was an elections observer during that country’s first free elections since dictator Muammar Gaddafi was ousted and killed in October 2011, and spoke to The Hill Times from Nagorno-Karabakh, an area in Azerbaijan that is in dispute between that country and Armenia.
He said that in countries like Libya, elections volunteers are given three days of training, as opposed to a few hours in Canada.
“We have got to make sure our people have enough training,” he said, adding that Canada cannot allow a replay of the clerical errors in Etobicoke Centre, Ont., that may lead to the electoral results in that riding being overturned, pending a Supreme Court decision.
Mr. Karygiannis added that Elections Canada needs to investigate complaints of elections “shenanigans” more quickly.
“It’s too slow. The trail is hot, and then it goes cold after a couple of months and people forget about it,” he said, explaining that he lodged a complaint with the agency after a handful of constituents told him they received robocalls purporting to be from the Liberal Party in the middle of the night during the last election.
Both the Conservative and the Liberal organizer said that observation was the best available safeguard against the unscrupulous players.
The Conservative source said that elections are “highly observed, highly regulated” environments.
To look out for voter fraud or other problems on election day, a riding’s top candidates can appoint scrutineers to challenge questionable voters and observe the ballot count at polling stations. But the Liberal estimated that an average downtown riding would have 200 to 240 polls, at as many as 80 different locations. To field enough volunteers to cover a 16-hour day a candidate would have to have 160 people to spare.
“It’s hard to do, but it’s something that a well-organized campaign should be able to do,” said the Conservative source.
Conservative pundit Tim Powers told The Hill Times recently that fielding scrutineers sometimes takes a back seat to other priorities when it comes to distributing volunteers.
“I think it depends on the candidate. Their needs. The resources both professional and amateur that they have and how they are deployed,” he said.
“Candidate scrutineers may fall behind in importance these days behind using volunteer resources to get out the vote. Different candidates though will have different practices,” he explained.
Mr. Karygiannis said that in the last election his campaign had 1,000 volunteers, and he had scrutineers at polling stations looking out for “questionable voters.”
“We teach our people what to watch out for, and we make sure that we follow up,” he said.
That unscrupulous people try and get around the system is nothing new, said Mr. Karygiannis.
The Liberal organizer said that when he started volunteering for campaigns, it was well-known that voter cards got stolen and leaflets misdirecting voters to the wrong polling stations would occasionally pop up.
“These are old tricks, they’re just being done electronically now,” he said.
The Conservative source stressed that there is no magical black box full of tricks at the disposal of political parties.
“What are the tactics we’re talking about fundamentally? We’re talking about the ability to send mail, the ability to make a phone call, and the ability to keep people’s names and political information organized in a database,” he said.
The political insiders were split as to the extent of abuse that takes place in Canada.
“Do I think there is widespread fraud in the system? No. I think there is a little bit of goofy fraud, because there always is. There are always bad people in any human enterprise, but I think it would be very hard in the system we have to essentially organize a conspiracy and then keep it quiet,” said the Conservative source.
The Liberal source said that while compared to other countries, Canada’s system was “extremely clean” that doesn’t mean it is problem-free.
He said: “Is there corruption and fraud going on? Absolutely. Are there dirty tricks? Every time.”
Liberal John Duffy, meanwhile, recently told The Hill Times that sophisticated new get-out-the-vote technologies could be helping unscrupulous candidates “game the system” in an election.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Jessica Bruno
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