THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE OF RMG

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 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.”

Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton served motions to have the case thrown out of court before the supporting evidence had been filed. 
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.”

And sure enough the 42nd federal election has brought them out above ground once again, now known as IMKT Direct Solutions in Canada and iMarketing Acquisitions in New Mexico. They are currently posting ads to hire call centre workers across Canada and Andrew Langhorne is once again launching those phone banks for Voter Outreach Centre, the name registered in February 2011 and used by RMG in the previous election as well. 

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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"We've done this experiment successfully in Canada"

We don't often get to see into the minds of cross border American conservative political operatives working in Canada. Here is one such snapshot, but first ...

CBC reported today on "CIMS-to-Go" or C2G, a new mobile app for the Cons Constituent Information Management System that allows party canvassers to collect and sort voter information faster than ever before - smiley face, frowny face - while keeping close tabs on candidates' and canvassers' efficiency.

Someone in the Cons IT dept, who is presumably right now clearing out their desk, blabbed to CBC that some Con ridings are "approved" to use it while others have to pay $2500. 

"The app comes with a script to follow, to make sure canvassers know what to say at the door."

CBC then went to Georganne Burke, who they describe as "a former regional organizer and community relations manager for the Conservatives", for more info. Ms. Burke has been using the newly released C2G app in her work for an unnamed "local Conservative campaign for the upcoming election". 

Hopefully this campaign does not involve menorahs.

Last September, The Daily Caller, a conservative Washington DC news and opinion website founded by Tucker Carlson and former adviser to Dick Cheney Neil Patel, explained what Burke was doing in Washington :

"Burke, a 45 year veteran of grassroots campaigning, was in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 3 [2014]  to help train conservatives on effective efforts to expand the reach for their ideas. Her credentials include being part of the team that eventually brought about a conservative majority government in Canada by effective outreach to minorities, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper."

Dual citizen Burke, who has worked as a special assistant to Tony Clement and Tim Hudak and "as a political organizer for the Conservatives starting in 2004", describes herself in the interview :

"In my heart I will probably always be an American first and foremost. I'm a Yankee at heart and will be my while life. I'm truly an American."

She is very concerned about the "politics of division that is practiced on the left" in Canada - dividing people into various ethnic groups - and offers this advice about "connecting with the various cultural communities in the US" : 

"Why I actually came down here is because we've done this experiment successfully in Canada. It took us eleven years of hard work and I came down to tell people that this is a long game we have to play here, that this is not something that happens overnight ... It's about marketing ... You have to get out and create relationships with people that you want to be your customers."

Quite. 

G&M Oct 16 2007 : Tories target specific ethnic voters :

"Getting more votes from Jews and specific ethnic groups ..."

"Conservative community relations manager Georganne Burke told Conservatives that outreach calls on them to work beyond their traditional base, even if it means "to look outside your normal comfort zone."

Ms. Burke urged Conservative candidates and organizers to break down each riding's ethnic and religious composition, and directly target potential voters.

She said that Conservatives should use all available opportunities to "build the database" of ethnic voters, by renting or buying lists of names from third parties and by attending events where they can gather business cards and guest lists."

That's just so friggin' Conthink - inveigh against the dividing of people into ethnic minority groups and then do it.  

Update : Georganne Burke is senior VP at Pathway Group, recently in the news for ousting a pair of their lobbyists over their involvement with a company under investigation with the Ontario Securities Commission. 
One of those ousted, Pathway Group co-founder Kelly Mitchell, founded the voter contact firm Picea Partners in March 2010 with former CIMS Direct Voter Contact manager Andrew Harris. Picea handled Fantino's by-election teleconference with Mike Duffy in November 2010 - the one that didn't show up in Fantino's campaign expenses.

Meanwhile, Steve is overseas with yet another select group of MPs doing his ethnic voting diaspora thing.

Which brings me back to CBC's CIMS-to-Go article :

"The app comes with a script to follow, to make sure canvassers know what to say at the door."

Are the smiley/frowny faces ethnic colour-coded now?

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CIMS nostalgia

Whoa, imagine finding this again!  An old CBC broadcast of CBC's Keith Boag being given a walk through CIMS with commentary from Michael Geist and Garth Turner. I've posted it twice over the years only to have it taken down at source. We'll see if it stays up this time.

First broadcast over seven years ago on Nov.21 2007, the report shows CPC Direct Voter Contact manager Andrew Harris explaining CIMS to Boag. Mr. Harris left the Cons' employ a year later and founded his own voter contact firm, Picea Partners in 2010.

Billed as "Canada's first and leading provider of Telephone Town Hall meetings", Picea did a tele-townhall in 2010 for by-election Vaughan candidate Julian Fantino, hosted by Senator Mike Duffy. They've also worked with Tim Hudak and the Ontario PC party, and more recently James Moore and Peter Kent. The governments of Canada, Alberta, and New Brunswick are listed as clients.

On their North American direct marketing and sales page, Picea boasts of "25 billion records from hundreds of different sources" :

"We gather data from real estate and income tax assessments, voter registration, hydro & gas connections, bill processors, and other sources before we output our lists to ensure quality and accuracy for your campaign."

Their "wide variety of targeting options" includes "Age, Estimated Household Income, Marital Status, Gender, Home Value, Ethnicity, and more".

Huh.

With the Manning Centre hosting workshops for Con MPs on capturing cell phone and Facebook actions using Nationbuilder :

"you can export data out of CIMS, load it into NationBuilder, interact with people, and then load that data back into CIMS"

the Cons might have actually built that "political super-weapon" they bragged about in the last election.

h/t Waterbaby for new link to CIMS broadcast.

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NationBuilder - And you thought CIMS was scary

Ten years ago the Cons bought CIMS, their Constituent Information Management System, and began stuffing it with our phone numbers and adding smiley/frowny faces beside our names and whatever other info they could glean about us. The other parties had their own lesser versions. Most of us first took notice of CIMS when we learned it had been used to perpetrate election fiddling in the last election. 

Now all the parties, although perhaps not all the members, use the newer and snazzier US import NationBuilder instead. Touted as more peer-to-peer grassroots organizing than traditional top-down voter ID programs, NationBuilder "builds social-media matching into voter files so that simply knowing an email address will let the software connect a voter’s picture, bio, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn."

Perhaps we should have paid more attention to its actual name.

Here Mike Moschella, a VP at the US company, explains the five keys for its success :

• Full social media integration means going beyond adding a Facebook icon next to a voter’s name in the file. Field staff need to be alerted when voters engage on their websites or social media platforms

• Campaigns need to share more than address and phone data with their grassroots leaders. Precinct captains need bios, photos and other information gained from online interactions.

• Training is needed to understand this shift in how campaigns talk with voters. A neighborhood leader will need to do more than cut a walk list - we’re moving from riding horses to driving cars.

• Campaigns must shift focus toward capturing mobile numbers. Having an event? Text to RSVP. Petition? Text to sign. Survey? Text to reply.

• The party infrastructure and campaign need to be in sync and must engage in the same efforts year round. Finding this data won’t occur overnight.

In March 2014, Moschella spoke at the Manning Centre. Here's a story he told [37 minute mark of podcast - transcribed]:

"For the last five years before coming to NationBuilder I worked in foreign policy in National Security so I worked with efforts around the world...You do a whole lot of work on that global police thing ... So I did a lot of work on re-imagining what an American foreign policy - a really pro-democratic, pro-democracy platform - would look like in a changing world because all these things with social media started to, despite people not wanting them, seep into what other countries were doing.  ... 

In Venezuela we ran an opposition race for a guy named Capriles against Hugo Chavez's hand-picked dictator, and they took 8-million twitter records, targeted 2-million of those people, directly talked to them on twitter with their friends -people, one friend connected to another person - and asked them to consider the pro-democracy candidate and 500,000 of those people got involved in that campaign. They probably won but the dictatorship called it 49%. But now there's a real opposition movement that's fighting for freedom in a major country called Venezuela.

In Malaysia for the first time ever, people used geo-targeting from social media to figure out where supporters of an opposition movement were and hold rallies in those slums to ask people to fight for their freedom and they created actually the first field campaign ever using a thing called NationBuilder."

It's a very interesting lecture from a believer in "social media as the personal touch of community on a grand scale" because as he insisted : "people do what their friends do".

I can't do it justice because it reminded me of Amway and the first year people sell insurance : You sell it to your friends and it only works if they in turn sell it to their friends and the product is always you. So listen to it for yourself.

After his presentation, he took questions from the floor.
Con MP Stella Ambler wanted to know how she could find out how many of her 1389 Facebook followers were actually in her small suburban riding - "Is there a way to do that?" - while noting that "our privacy laws are different in this country". 

Moschella : 

"So here's the thing about Facebook. Any time anyone takes an action, FB has three types of actions - you can share something, you can comment on something, or you can like something. And actually the terms of service of FB dictates that when you take an action on FB, that's actually a public thing. Cool, huh? 

What that allows us to do is connect those actions into your NationBuilder database. So if your FB page is connected to your site which is connected to your backend database, then we can show you how to do this - it's like a two, three minute process to get going - literally all you need is a password. Then anytime somebody shares, comments, or likes a post, it will either a)create a profile for that person in your NationBuilder database so now you own that relationship, or b) find their existing profile if they're already in there and record that they have taken that action. 

When you know all the actions that people take, then you can do the next thing which is really key to your engagement which is actually quantifying that engagement. So what you would do in your campaign, is say, sharing something on FB is worth one point, commenting is worth two points, making a donation is worth 10 points. And when you have all this together, then you'll actually see that Edward is worth 20 points and Mike is worth 50 points. So then you can sort how valuable people are in your community and really smartly target them."

                                                                                     [snip] 

Ambler : 

"So .. texting. How do you ... you don't have their cell phone numbers. Their addresses aren't on there on their FB profiles. Sorry to get into the weeds like this..."

Answer from either Moschella or Mike Martens, director of the Manning Centre’s School of Practical Politics - I couldn't tell : 

"You create a data capture system that grabs their cell phones. It's not that hard to do. You have to get organizing to get more data and it's like a cycle - it's like a snowball effect - you have to start somewhere but if you do data capture well, you'll be able to get their cellphone. Mike is going to shut me up."

"Stella, you're a member of Parliament? So you use CIMS. CIMS has all the phone numbers. So the question is whether or not CIMS and NationBuilder can integrate and once the Party starts working with the Manning Centre, and we're working with them to do that, Manning Centre is working with NationBuilder to do training and we can start training on how CIMS and NationBuilder work in a legal way regarding the privacy thing. So somebody needs to figure that out. There are legal ways - I know some of them - but we're getting into some really fine- some of these things were answered in the morning. My point is not that we can't talk about them here except-"

Ambler :  "No, I'm just so pleased to know somebody is having that conversation."

Mike ... or perhaps Mike : 

"We're thinking about this, we're working on it. NationBuilder has some reallly neat - one thing that NationBuilder is really exciting is its text capability based on being in an event like this, telling everybody text me. Well as soon as they do that, guess what - you've got their cell phone number. So then you've got to think of creative events where then that kind of conversation can occur and that's a different kind of campaign than emailing. 

I guess my point is, Stella, that we are thinking that NationBuilder has solutions. We just need to figure out how the NationBuilder and CIMS systems, which currently the CIMS system is kind of closed, but you can export data out of CIMS, load it into NationBuilder, interact with people, and then load that data back into CIMS. So that's just very superficially how these things can work but there's probably even more open ways - things called APIs that interact two systems in a live manner that might be discovered but we'll have to work with NationBuilder to figure it out."

Mike Martens : "Folks, 30 seconds before Mark Steyn's session begins ..."

h/t to Port Moody/Coquitlam Election 2015, who wrote a post on Newclear's young Con contenders that I riffed on on Tuesday, and then he added a look at the NewClear/NationBuilder nexus to his post which has set me off again...

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Manning conference : Big Brother's big data

The Cons opposed collecting data for the long gun registry and the Canada long form census as "too intrusive" - and also muzzled Canadian federal scientists to keep any of their data from leaking out - but on Saturday they eagerly attended a conference to hear 'big data' proponents discuss how to collect more data about you in order to win elections.

Canada ‘light years’ behind U.S. on data mining in election campaigns, time to catch up, say experts 

Innovations in big data have started a “revolution” in the way political parties target voters and win election campaigns ...

 “There is a revolution in the way campaigns are not only run, but won,” said Mike Martens, director of the Manning Centre’s School of Practical Politics, at the Manning Centre Conference March 9 in Ottawa, at a session called, “The Cutting Edge in Practical Politics, The Data Revolution.” 

At the conference, Washington Slate columnist Sasha Issenberg explained in the years since the 2000 election in the United States, detailed voter registration information has been combined with information on individual customers from corporations to produce a detailed portrait of voters, how much they earn, their ethnicity, political affiliations, age, gender, annual income, and more.

It’s “a breakthrough,” said Mr. Issenberg, who wrote The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.

Tom Flanagan, "the godfather of CIMS" the Cons' voter database, told the G&M last year that purchased consumer data on spending habits was not added to CIMS while he was with the party.
But last year I posted a 2008 vid of CBC's Keith Boag getting a walk-through of CIMS by a Con staffer, augmented by commentary from Garth Turner and Michael Geist. Google took it down sometime this year so you can't watch it now and all that remains is a quote beneath it left by an outraged commenter :

"All of them have access to the list of voters provided by Elections Canada - from there they are free to buy data commercially."
What!

But there's this :
Can Press, October 18, 2007 : Tory database draws ire of privacy experts

The federal Conservative party's central database is set up to track the confidential concerns of individual constituents without their knowledge or consent, says former Tory MP Garth Turner. Privacy experts agree the practice is a clear breach of standard privacy ethics -- but probably not the law, because federal political parties fall into a legislative grey area. 

Both the federal Liberals and the NDP have separate databases for constituency work and voter tracking. Data does not migrate between the two. But the Conservatives use a single clearing house for all data collection, storage, data mining, mailing lists, voter tracking and any other partisan use such information may serve.

A single clearing house for all data. 
And now a further blurred line between "the Party" and the government, courtesy of Michael Sona last week :

Really? Government staffers in the public service working on the Hill "were encouraged" to add info about Canadians to a partisan Con Party election campaign database? Government subsidizing a political party?

I guess that's why they call it "the Harper government".

Update : Kai Nagata covered the Manning Conference for The Tyee. Here he catches Blogging Tory founder Stephen Taylor, who now holds Harper's old job as head of the National Citizens Coalition, bragging on the 'big data' panel about the Conservative Caucus Research Bureau's use of public funds for micro-targeting voters in 2008 :

"We sent out, I think, probably a hundred million pieces of mail. Paid for by the taxpayer, I should say. They were each barcoded, and they were each very issue-specific. Most people would sort of ignore it or say 'this is garbage.' But the few people who would actually send it back and say 'Hell yeah, that's what I'm all about' -- you would be able to put them in a database." 

Taylor's group, the NCC, gathers and cross-references sets of data to build pictures of voter types and figure out how to speak to them. 

"We found that CBC privatization petition signers are most likely Molson Canadian drinkers, they watch Dexter on television, they enjoy Sun News Network, they vote Conservative, they're from Toronto, and they donate to World Vision." Those discoveries help shape the messaging. 

A voter who proves unusually engaged on an issue can often be recruited as a volunteer. That's where Mike Martens comes in. Formerly the regional organizer for the federal Conservative Party in B.C., he now runs the School of Practical Politics at the Manning Centre. From now until the next election, Martens will be training thousands of volunteers online and at the school's new campus in Calgary.

From the Conservative Caucus Research Bureau to CIMS to your ear - your tax dollars hard at work re-electing the Harper government.


Best irony overload at the conference came from Tony Clement, MNC big data panelist and President of the Treasury Board of the most secretive government in Canadian history :

“I happen to think of data as Canada’s 21st century resource. … When all the information is supplied to the citizenry, why does government have to make the decision?"

And speaking of Tom Flanagan ... You know all those writers' and academics' editorials coming to Flanagan's defence over his child pornography remarks :

Jonathan Kay : The mobbing of Tom Flanagan is unwarranted and cruel 
Barry Cooper : Some academics are coming to the defence 
Rainer Knopff : U of C owes Tom Flanagan an apology 
William Watson : Tom Flanagan, meet George Orwell
Conrad Black : Turning public discourse into a never-ending shriek of ‘unclean!’
Jonathan Kay again : Tom Flanagan’s media critics leave their spines at the door

They all write for the Manning Centre's C2C Journal,  financed by Gwyn Morgan, his spouse Patricia Trottier, and the Manning Centre for Building Democracy 

Photo of Knopff at MNC 2013 sporting Flanagan button : David Climenhaga, Alberta Diary

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RoboConstructions: Del Mastro and the GeoVote

Update June 13 : The above vid has been taken down from Youtube so here's CTV's Youtube version of it :



Back to original January post .... Dean Del Mastro and his $21,000 personal cheque to Frank Hall at Holinshed Research Group for voter ID/GOTV services are back in the news tonight as McMaher reports the RCMP are investigating Steve's hapless parliamentary secretary/RoboCon pointman for his various 2008 election campaign financing irregularities and their apparent ham-fisted cover-up.

The  details   were   extensively   covered   back   in   June, including Holinshed's lapsed Feb 2 2010 lawsuit against Del Mastro for non-payment of use of their CIMS-like interactive voter-tracking system called GeoVote, and the six figure Canada Economic Action Plan cheque Holinshed received to develop GeoVote in 2009/10 ... before Holinshed dropped off the map themselves in 2011.


I haven't seen the vid up top of Frank Hall explaining the GeoVote system in 2008 posted anywhere else before so here ya go. In this demonstration, Mr Hall pinpoints locations of how people voted in the Don Valley West riding :

"What we've done is put a face on it and a geographic location on it and a contact that becomes personal or personable all of a sudden because you can take that data and use it - it puts a name and a face and a geographic location on something and that's powerful."

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Give a RoboCon barcode this Christmas

Are you tired of shlepping around the mall looking for a gift that will top that asteroid you had named after her last year?

This Christmas give that very special someone in your life the gift everyone across Canada is talking about ...
their own unique barcode in the Cons' CIMS data playbook.

Adopt a frowny/duh/smiley face just for her when you answer questions about Israel or the gun registry.

The CIMS Vote-O-Matic. It slices, it dices, it makes juliennefantino fries.
Operators are standing by.
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RoboCon : A history lesson

Four years ago CBC's Keith Boag did this piece on voter data-gathering and microtargeting, including a look at the Cons' CIMS database and cameos from Michael Geist and Con-turned-Lib MP Garth Turner.

Much more interesting now, isn't it?
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RoboConduct unbecoming

Shorter CBC : They call you up and ask what party you support; if not a Con supporter, you get a frowny face entered next to your name on the Cons voter identification system CIMS, and a callback later advising you your polling station has been moved to wherever - a mall, a real estate office. 
CBC's Terry Milewski tracked this in 31 ridings clear across the country.

Former Tory MP Inky Mark, maverick that he is, confirmed how the smileyface/frownyface CIMS system works, adding that he opted out of it because :

"the party had control over the entire, nationwide database. An MP and his staff were at the mercy of headquarters, Mark says, because they had the power to allocate and revoke database passwords." 

Unfuckablewith discovers CISM is "designed explicitly" to be integrated with "a feature to perform robocalls on a nationwide level". He has a working draft up on security flaws in the CIMS and LiberaList, with the most interesting bits so far redacted while he thinks them through : 

"A shocking amount of personal information is stored on these servers and can be recalled for use in individual campaign offices and on Parliament Hill via a secure VPN connection to the main Conservative Party servers.  While this leaves the system vulnerable to [redacted], the greater issue is that in the process of establishing this VPN connection, the data [redacted], and thus, outside of the control of Canadian authorities." 

"the data ___ and thus outside the control of Canadian authorities" ???
The data is what?  Stored in the fridge? Stored on servers at some US voter- ID/townhall company? 

Which reminds me : Con MP Julian Fantino, Associate Minister of F-35s, is outraged, outraged, that three former board members of his Guelph electoral district association have alleged a second undeclared campaign bank account of $300,000+, which Elections Canada does not allow :

Fantino : 

“I am grateful to the people of Vaughan for their support of our honorable and ethical election campaigns. The disgraceful accusations from these individuals is false.”

Fantino’s fundraising co-chair Sam Ciccolini immediately replaced former board member Richard Lorello as a Director after Lorello quit over the alleged secret account. Ciccolini is Director and Chair of the Audit Committee at Italian Canadian Savings & Credit Union, home of the same alleged secret account :

"There was no wrongdoing, there was no impropriety, and there were zero allegations of wrongdoing during the elections. They talk about a second account; there was no second account," said Ciccolini on Tuesday."

*cough* Michael Harris, iPolitics :

"Then there is this evidence of a second account from Sam Ciccolini himself. In an e-mail dated April 29, 2011 to former Director Richard Lorello and Frank Domenichiello, who was president of the Vaughan Conservative EDA, Mr. Ciccolini stated that, “The reason we still have the second account still open is that Mirella [Chiapetta][secretary to Julian Fantino] felt that it would be best to have the TD bank account as they have been good to us and there were some transactions – checks that have yet to clear and at some point we would close it. I do not remember any vote taken on it, could be wrong….”  These comments were made on April 29 during the General Election, and according to Mr. Ciccolini, there still seem to be two bank accounts."

404 Systems Error published the docs a couple of weeks ago.

As noted in the CBC clip above, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand announced today that he now has "over 700 Canadians from across the country" who allege "specific circumstances" of fraudulent or improper calls and he would be pleased to appear before committee (that would be PROC) to discuss it. 

Ha! PROC going in camera in 3  ... 2 ... 1

One a lighter note, among all the 'RoboCon is no-biggie' editorials flourishing in our media comes this amusing one from a former Con candidate: The great robocall scandal is a fraud.

Spending more than a minute talking to a voter is a Liberal plot, she says, all this fuss about fraud is just Pierre Poutine, and even if it wasn't :

"Out of a list of say, 1,000 phone numbers of supposed opposition supporters that you would get off a voters’ list, probably half are wrong."  

So again - no biggie. Apart from the fact voters' lists don't have phone numbers.
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h/t to Anon in comments for Vaughan Weekly link

Update - really rolling now :  Dave, RossK, and Dawg dig deeper : 
Dave : Toto I don't think we're in Guelph anymore and More pretty dots More evidence
RossK : Real/Not Robocall ... The number on Lori Bruce's phone
Dr. Dawg : Roboscam : Abuse of constituents.
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