"No-one seems to be talking about this yet… GE2019 and the use of Social Media Sock Puppets and Psychological Operations, Postal Vote Fraud and Voter Suppression. This wasn’t so much a political event trading policy ideas on level playground but more like a military operation with one side armed to to teeth with tanks and fighter jets with the other with handbags.
Background
The Tories were in a real mess in October 2019 running a minority government. Johnson was goading Corbyn to call for an election. Johnson obviously had a plan for the election and it had nothing to do with policy or a vision of the future for Britain, it was just three words “Get Brexit Done” – whatever that means (as far as I can tell it is just to let Tory Donors off the hook from tax avoidance scams).
The Tories ran a pretty dreadful campaign. Johnson was Boo-ed on many of his public outings and his team were a shambles, offending Greenfeld victims, NHS workers and patients, and doging any questions regarding climate change or the environment. Johnson was defending a marginal seat with only 4000 odd majority, but did not even attend hustings in his consituency. A similar story can be found in Consituencies in the north of England (soon to be won by them in the GE) where there was precious little evidence of a Tory campaign on the ground.
Corbyn was met with huge crowds of supporters, chanting and cheering wherever he went. But this was not reported in the Mainstream Media, prefering it seems attack him personally and Labour in general with various “weaponised” lines of questioning regarding anti-seminitism (a problem that affected Labour at a rate of 0.01% of its membership). The BBC – supposedly impartial and in “purdah” – went out of its way to edit video to make Johnson look good and covering up on the Jennifer Arcuri scandal, the withholding of the “Russia Report” and the social media manipulations, particulalry the sock puppet accounts, over the boy on the floor in Leeds Hospital. https://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/read-this/general-election-2019-leeds-general-infirmary-fake-news-flooding-social-media-explained-1337095. These sock puppet accounts demonstrated the immense social media capability available to the Tories.
Various commentators noted that the gap between Conservatives and Labour was narrowing mainly because the polls had not accounted for the Youth Quake, dying Brexit voters and Campaign disasters (such as Fridge Gate). There was the issue of Labour voters moving to the Brexit Party but both the LibDems, Brexit Party and Tories had a dreadful campaign and many people expected a shift to Labour.
General Election 12th December 2019
So on the day of the General Election, there were extraordinary queues at polling stations in many consituencies: Young Voters coming out in force. But at 10.30pm the exit polls were announced and the BBC was 99% accurate to the actual result… which is rather strange since the postal votes were at an extraordinary high – double the number in 2017 and not counted towards the exit poll. Did the BBC have other data to work other than the exit poll information?
VICS
Before the EU Referendum, Dominic Cummings had created a system for Vote Leave called the Voter Intentions Collection System (VICS). This is well documented in Dominic Cummings own blog. https://dominiccummings.com/on-the-eu-referendum/ It provides a statistical probability of each and every vote and voter, fed by data sources “conventional and unconventional”.
For Vote Leave this Big Data was fed from information from facebook: information on 2 billion (yes, 2 billion) people collected by Cambridge Analytica. There is an ongoing case about the fraudulent collection of this data and still further speculation whether this data was available to Dominic Cummings in 2019.
In 2019, Dominic Cummings claimed that voters were persuaded to change their attitudes to people, party and desire to vote by targetted adverts. Facebook allows targetted ads including by location, demographics (age, gender, education, job title), interests, behaviour and connections, include people who are connected to your people or events, or to exclude them. So the Tories had the ability to target people that were likely to be swayed by their ads. Cummings claim they tested the ads on small groups, fine tuned them and then pushed out to larger groups. The ads were largely attack ads against Corbyn or “Get Brexit Done” messages with overtone of racism. The ads were targetted towards football supporters and football supporter mentality… which is largely pretty racist…
Sock Puppets
However to really guage voter intention, VICS needs more than just targetting information it needs, feedback and engagement. Social media, particularly facebook, is the tool of choice. Sock Puppet accounts and bots were enabled to do a number of things:
a) identify a person who was likely to vote for a particular party – if confirmed views, would they be voting?
b) identify people who could possibly be infulenced “floating voters”, and if infulenced would they vote?
c) identify people who were unlikely to vote at all
In particular, besides identifying voter’s political view, the sock puppets and bots could re-inforce tribal behaviour and commitment to vote by either “liking” posts, engaging in chit-chat and obtaining such confirmation. As mentioned above, the Tories had demonstrated a massive capability for its sock puppets and bots. But it is unlikely that these were directly controlled by Tory Party operatives but either UK Intelligence Services or Foriegn Intelligence Services – the most likely being, not Russia, but USA and Israel who both have massive capability for such “Pyschological Operations“.
Postal Vote Fraud
IDOX systems are used to used to manage Postal Votes in around 80% of UK elections. It does not count votes but managing the requests, sending out voter packs, verifying the packs and managing the electoral rolls. This is gold dust info into a system like VICS. So was the data passed deliberately to Tory CCHQ? Maybe not necessary – just hacked – Rabid Tory Peter Lilly was a former director of IDOX – he could have passed on details to people that could then easily hack the IDOX systems. We know for instance that each IDOX installation was separated (so no central database) and I’m sure, “good security controls” but each system was also capable of being connected by wi-fi and/or the internet and so, of course, wide open to any determined organisation to hack into it. (See picture). The Institue of Statecraft for example, would easily be able to achieve this.
Postal Vote Fraud
Various efforts are now in play to investigate the postal vote fraud but this is nothing new. There was a postal vote court case in England in September 2019 and suspected postal vote fraud in the Scottish Referendum For GE2019 early information indicates that both Safe Tory Seats and Marginals won by the Conservative, had high Postal Ballot percentages, double the usual figures.
Voter Suppression
Finally there is evidence of voter suppression, particularly of youngsters, people living abroad and new British Citizens, (and there’s more on the way). The evidence for this is available all over Twitter.