B.C. Liberal leadership candidate Todd Stone’s campaign admits it had to cancel 1,349 memberships it signed up with improper email addresses after concerns raised by auditors within the Liberal party.
Stone campaign co-chair Peter Fassbender said Friday that a social media marketing company the campaign had contracted, called Aggregate IQ, created domain names and email portals to attach email addresses to new members, who were mainly non-English speaking Chinese residents from Richmond and Indo-Canadian residents from Surrey.
“It was an error in judgement made by the individual who was doing that data entry at AIQ,” Fassbender said in an interview. “It was not malicious or with the intent to do anything untoward. But we all agreed those membership would not be allowed in the voting process.”
The problems began Jan. 26 when the party raised concerns about the authenticity of the memberships, said Fassbender.
“Todd was not involved in the day to day management of the campaign, that was his campaign team,” said Fassbender. “As soon as he found out there was an issue he asked, and the team had already started to, dive into the issue.”
At a subsequent meeting with the party’s rules committee, the party deemed the memberships invalid, and the Stone campaign agreed to remove them.
“Our understanding at that time was these were real people who had paid their membership but there was something that didn’t comply with the standards the party had set for emails,” said Fassbender.
The core of the allegations against Stone relate to his campaign allegedly registering domain names that it would use to then create numerous fake email addresses, which it would then assign to new members when registering them with the party. If true, the move could have theoretically allowed the Stone campaign to control registration on behalf of those members, collect their personal identification numbers from the party, and then vote on their behalf, which is not allowed under party rules.
Fassbender said it didn’t get that far, because the emails were flagged before any PINs were issued or any votes cast.
The disclosure raises questions about why Stone has spent several days publicly claiming his campaign had no more memberships disqualified than any other campaign, when it clearly had significant internal issues.
The party instituted stricter rules in 2017 to prevent against bulk voting, because in the 2011 leadership race won by Christy Clark the problem was so widespread that some campaigns were hosting “PIN parties” where they would mass vote on behalf of voters whose ID numbers they’d obtained. That prompted complaints by some members who went to vote only to discover their PINs had already been used to cast ballots for somebody else.
The admission from the Stone camp comes on the same day the campaign faced a public attack by a rival camp for its membership issues.
Bill Bennett, a former cabinet minister and co-chair of Andrew Wilkinson’s campaign, said Stone should be disqualified and that the party should release publicly information about the allegations before the voting is finished on Feb. 3.
“I actually like Todd Stone,” Bennett said in an interview Friday. “I’m shocked at this, I don’t know where this comes from. I’m blown away by this.”
“This kind of behaviour is so repugnant to most members that they are now saying well better Dianne (Watts) wins than Todd,” Bennett continued, “She’s not particularly capable, and it will be really difficult for people like Andrew and Mike de Jong because they are going to have to babysit her. She is not ready for this. But she hasn’t given any indication there is anything wrong with her ethics.”
The Michael Lee, Dianne Watts, Mike de Jong and Andrew Wilkinson campaigns co-signed a letter this week calling on the party to make public the allegations against Stone. The party declined at the time, saying in a statement that: “Thorough inspection and verification protocols for membership applications submitted by all leadership campaigns, with the result that a number of applications from each of the submitting campaigns were not accepted.”
But the situation was exacerbated by a subsequent Postmedia interview in which Stone appeared to mischaracterize the party’s position. “The party was crystal clear in saying everybody’s had about the same number of rejected memberships,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been saying all along.”
Bennett said the handling of the Stone memberships by the party has prompted grumbling and dissatisfaction among members.
“I think the party has made a very serious error in judgement here,” he said. “And I think depending on what happens in the leadership, whoever wins, there is potential here for a major loss of members. And even if not loss of members, loss of commitment, volunteerism, donations, if the wrong person wins in this race.”
It is the second time during the race that Bennett, the former MLA for Kootenay East, has made headlines for attacking another candidate. In January, he blasted his own candidate, Wilkinson, for striking a co-operating deal with de Jong, saying he didn’t trust de Jong and couldn’t support the decision.
The party says the six candidates signed up almost 30,000 new members, to bring the total number of eligible Liberal voters to approximately 60,000.
“All membership applications submitted to the party were subject to a rigorous inspection and verification process,” Liberal party executive director Emile Scheffel in a statement on Friday.
“In any case where the party was not satisfied that an email address was the applicant’s own as required by the rules, those applications were not accepted.
“Based on that process, we are confident that only those membership applications that have met all of the party’s criteria for membership, including those applications submitted by the Todd Stone campaign, have been accepted.”
Voting on the Liberal leadership race continues, with a new leader to be named Feb. 3.
