Party of One (8 page)

“Pierre” then called the RackNine phone system, logged in to his newly created account, and uploaded a file containing 6,737 phone numbers of Liberal supporters. He then loaded a nearly identical list, except for a single added phone number, the number of his own burner phone. (That way, he would know when the calls began, and could check his voice mail for public reaction.) “Pierre” uploaded two voice recordings: one purporting to be a call from the Liberal campaign of Frank Valeriote, and the other a fake Elections Canada call telling voters that their polling location had been changed. For unknown reasons, only the fake Elections Canada calls were eventually made.

“Pierre Jones” was up early on election day. Shortly after 4 a.m., he logged on to RackNine from the Burke campaign IP address. Three minutes later, the account assigned to Andrew Prescott logged on to RackNine from the same IP address. Everything was finally in place. A little after 10 a.m., on May 2, 2011, thousands of misleading automated calls claiming to be from Elections Canada directed Guelph area voters to the wrong polling station. Although the number on voters’ call displays was a Quebec number, the calls were actually coming from RackNine, the Conservative voicebroadcasting vendor thousands of kilometres away in Edmonton, Alberta. The technique of masking the origin of such calls is known as “spoofing.” Account holders can enter any ID number they wish to be displayed for their calling campaign. The Conservatives used an American firm, Front Porch Strategies, for their town hall calls in ten campaigns in the 2011 election. Those calls looked like they were coming from local numbers, but they were actually being dialled from Ohio.

Telephone records from Bell would later show that number 450-760-7746 called only two phone numbers, other than its own voice mail. The phone number 866-467-2259 was called three times on April 30 from “Pierre’s” burner cellphone; and 877-841-3511
was called seven times in the late evening, May 1, 2011, by the same cellphone. Both numbers belonged to RackNine, and an automated message welcomed the callers to the service. The second number asked the caller to log in with a customer number. All told, there were thirty-seven other calls made from Guelph to the RackNine numbers between March 26 and May 5, 2011. As the Burke campaign’s RackNine contact, most of Andrew Prescott’s calls went to the customer login number. RackNine later issued a statement: “The individuals who abused RackNine’s services attempted to hide their identity from RackNine itself.”

Although hundreds of Liberal voters turned up at the wrong location to cast ballots, the Conservatives lost the seat in Guelph, a riding they had targeted. But that disappointment paled beside the euphoria in the Conservative camp: Stephen Harper had pulled off his first majority government. The story of dirty tricks in the 2011 election died down, eclipsed as it was by the new political reality in Canada. The Conservatives now had a majority, and the Liberal Party had been reduced to third-party status. Its leader, Michael Ignatieff, had been destroyed by the tried-and-true methods of Arthur Finkelstein. This time the deadly slogan seemed innocuous: “Just Visiting,” a derogatory reference to Ignatieff ’s return to Canada after decades of working abroad. But like smoke from an unseen fire, the robocalls scandal continued to smoulder.

Three months after the election, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand mentioned the “crank calls” to voters in his election report tabled in Parliament in August 2011. Mayrand, a bankruptcy expert until his appointment as chief electoral officer of Canada in 2007, reported in August 2012 that Elections Canada had received 1,394 complaints about misleading or harassing calls in 234 of 308 ridings across the country. Once voters understood what had happened, the number of complaints had skyrocketed.

Only 473 out of 20,000 polling locations had actually changed location during the 2011 federal election—and in the last week of the campaign, when it was too late to send out a revised voter information card by mail, just 61. (The percentage of voting stations across Canada that changed location in the final week of the federal election was just 0.003.) In the forty-first general election “a party” asked Elections Canada for polling site information, which Elections Canada then provided to all registered political parties. In the restrictions accompanying the data, Elections Canada told campaigns not to provide poll site information to voters, specifying that “the database was for internal purposes only, and was not to be ‘used to inform voters of their voting locations via mail-outs or other forms of communication.’” Despite the “warning,” in 2011, the Conservative national campaign did place calls with poll information. Had someone cleverly realized that those last-minute location changes provided the perfect cover to use calls to suppress the vote?

The investigation into the 2011 election scandal started quietly, just two days after Stephen Harper’s victory. The implications were momentous. Had the Conservatives stolen the election, the way many Liberals believed they had in 2006, by illegally spending a million dollars more on advertising than campaign spending limits allowed? Al Mathews, a seasoned investigator and former RCMP officer, began by filing a series of court orders for telephone records. The Conservative Party’s main phone bank company was RMG. The Marty Burke campaign in Guelph listed both RMG ($15,000) and another firm, Campaign Research, ($6,215) as campaign expenses. On its website, RMG said it worked exclusively with right-of-centre campaigns to develop fundraising and voter contact strategies. In 2011, RMG provided live calling services for the Conservative Party’s national campaign as well as eighty local campaigns using data from the Conservative Constituent Information Management System (CIMS), provided by the party
or local candidates.
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CIMS was the party’s voter-tracking database, and kept track of all voters nationwide. Live calls for political campaigns cost about $30 per hour.

But Elections Canada investigators also traced calls from Burke’s campaign office to RackNine, the Conservative voter contact firm in Edmonton, Alberta. Inexplicably, the Burke campaign did not include any payment to the Alberta company in its election expenses. That mystery was solved when Andrew Prescott later explained that he had paid for the robocalls himself and been reimbursed through his $1,100 honorarium. His invoice had apparently not been forwarded to Marty Burke’s official agent by campaign manager Ken Morgan, nor did it appear on Burke’s declaration of election expenses. On June 8, 2011, investigator Al Mathews filed a request seeking Bell Canada records for the “burner” cellphone he believed had been used to make the deceitful calls.

On November 23, 2011, Mathews served a court order on RackNine seeking records related to the Conservative campaign in Guelph, including calls from the burner phone used by “Pierre.” RackNine had thirty days to produce the data and documents. The production order specified that RackNine itself was not under investigation for the offences outlined in the official request for information. According to Mathews and Conservative Party records, the Guelph campaign IP address was used by five of Marty Burke’s campaign volunteers to access the party database. Mathews alleged that “RackNine client #45, whom RackNine believed to be Andrew Prescott . . . logged into RackNine as client #45 in a single web session along with client #93 using the same IP address.” Client #93 was “Pierre Jones.”

The call logs showed that the burner phone used by “Pierre Poutine” was contacted multiple times from locations in the United States, including six text messages from numbers in Anaheim and Pasadena, California. There was also an incoming
voice call to “Poutine’s” burner phone from a number in the area code for Fairport, New York. The call lasted twenty-one seconds. When Mathews tried these numbers, they were perpetually busy or out of service. The US calls and texts baffled investigators.

Mathews found that RackNine received thirty-three calls from phones at Marty Burke’s campaign headquarters and the Guelph Conservative Electoral District Association, from March 26, 2011, through to election day. The contact person was Andrew Prescott. Burke’s deputy campaign manager, he had used his account at RackNine to send out a mass warning to the public late on election day about the bogus robocalls—long after Burke communications officer Michael Sona issued his press release doing the same thing.

In a sworn statement, investigator Mathews laid out his conclusion about the considerable stealth used by whoever had made the calls: “I believe that the individual(s) behind the misleading calls which are the subject of this investigation would not want a local campaign to be identified with the calls, as they amount to improper activity, and consequently, I believe that any expense would likely be omitted to a campaign return.”

Marty Burke’s campaign office wasn’t the only group calling RackNine. According to investigator Mathews, records of incoming contacts to the Edmonton firm showed forty calls from the Ottawa and eastern Ontario area code 613. Nine of those calls were traced back to voice recordings for Rebecca Rogers, a contact person for local media during Harper’s campaign stops, and Chris Rougier, the party’s manager of voter relation programs. Both worked at headquarters with Jenni Byrne, who ran the 2011 national campaign.
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Rogers made eight calls to RackNine on April 30, 2011, and Rougier made one call on May 1, 2011. A Conservative official maintained that the party’s central campaign merely used RackNine to promote Harper’s events, and that Rebecca Rogers arranged these legitimate calls. The one call to
RackNine that HQ never explained was Chris Rougier’s, the day before the election.

RackNine’s service worked as follows: The customer would provide three things: a recording of a voice message; an electronic file of phone numbers to be called; and finally, automated scheduling instructions, including what caller ID number they wanted displayed. The firm’s automated process would then call the numbers on the list with the recorded message according to the client’s scheduling. RackNine could place 200,000 calls an hour at only 1.9 cents a call. Meier said he did not listen to the messages and that his clients normally settled their accounts using PayPal, an internet payment service. He estimated that RackNine placed ten million calls from about two hundred accounts during the 2011 election campaign. At a price of just under 2 cents per call, the robocalls could be considered a bargain: the whole operation cost about $200,000. The high-tech system was capable of doing “serious damage.” In 2010, Meier had also described his system as a “political superweapon.”

Meier was able to locate a digital copy of the fake election message that “Pierre” had sent to Guelph residents, and played it for Mathews. He also located a second message the same client had uploaded but later deleted, which was never sent. Although technically deleted, the message was embedded within RackNine’s sophisticated logging system. As a matter of policy, the firm retained a record of all transactions with clients, including deleted material. It was the best way to deal with any dispute that might arise with a client. When Mathews listened to the second message, he noted that it appeared to support the Liberal Party in Guelph. According to the original customer instructions, the same list of non-supporters used for the fake Elections Canada message was to be called, with two major differences: the calls were to go out to Liberal supporters between 2:00 a.m. and
4:45 a.m. Guelph time on election day, and the calling number to be displayed was that of the Liberal campaign office. The calls were designed to irritate potential Liberal voters by rousing them in the middle of the night, which would hopefully make them less inclined to vote.

Meier said he had identified the client who requested the misleading election messages as RackNine client #93. He located a brief email thread with the client between April 30 and May 2, 2011, which he said was the only record he had of the client’s identity. The emails had been preceded by a phone conversation. Meier had asked his new client for contact information, including his name, address, phone number, and affiliated organization. The client replied that he was Pierre S. Jones, a University of Ottawa correspondence student residing in Joliette, Quebec. He gave his burner phone as his contact number—450-760-7746—and signed his emails “Pierre.” Meier gave a copy of the emails sent from
[email protected]
to investigator Mathews.

The more Mathews talked to Matt Meier, the bigger the elephant in the room must have become. As recorded in court documents, Mathews said he was advised by Meier in emails on December 1, 2011, and February 27, 2012, and in person on May 9, 2012, “that all his clients know him or are recommended to him through political candidates, campaign managers, political party staff or party activists/organizers.” If that were true, it meant that the proprietor of RackNine could hold the key to the identity of “Pierre.” Meier may not have known client #93, but according to his business practice, he should know the person who had recommended him and given out his private contact information. The shortest route to unmasking “Pierre” seemed to be finding the intermediary who had introduced him to RackNine.

But here the story went out of focus. “Pierre” had originally called Meier on his “unlisted extension directly and asked for him
by name.”
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Since Meier claimed he didn’t know who had referred “Pierre” to him, his services were apparently not quite as exclusive as his company policy would lead an investigator to believe. Either that, or Meier was not telling everything he knew about his mysterious client. The obvious next step in the investigation was to find the IP address “Pierre” had used. When Mathews met with him in November 2011, Meier had not been able to provide an IP address for the logins. For the moment, not only “Pierre’s” identity but also the location of the computer he had used remained unknown.

On May 2, client #93 was called at 10:03 a.m. and recorded by RackNine as an early hangup. The first “test call” would have alerted “Pierre Jones” that the calls to voters had begun. (Test calls are a client option on the RackNine database.) The robocalls went out between 10:03 and 10:14 a.m., at a cost of just $162.10.
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The IP address used to pay RackNine turned out to be a proxy server that investigators traced back to a Marc Norris in Conquest, Saskatchewan—the only province that didn’t have complaints about robocalls. Proxy servers are intermediary websites that make internet queries anonymous. Mathews formally requested information from Norris in Saskatchewan on April 16, 2012, and Norris contacted his hosting site, ServInt. Based in McLean, Virginia, the company was founded in 1995 and is a provider of managed virtual private servers (VPS) and open proxies. Their records are retained for twenty-four hours, and then deleted. “Pierre” had clearly wanted to remain anonymous.