Free Party of One by Michael Harris

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 877-841-3511was 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