When it comes to the Harper Conservatives, corruption knows no bounds and nowhere is this more true than when it comes to how they "get out the vote." The Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada (MLPC) referred to the outcome of the 41st General Election as an "electoral coup." The essence of a coup, electoral or military, is to seize power by methods that by-pass an expression of the will of the people. An electoral coup by-passes the society's established methods of determining the will of the people for the purpose of having that will turned into the legal will in the form of a government. Micro-targeting as honed and practiced by the Harper Conservatives, leading to their election victory to form a majority government, is in a manner very similar to organizing a coup.

In the run-up to the 2011 Federal Election, the Conservatives targeted 45 ridings using their database and used micro-targeting to reach definite segments of electors including those "very ethnic" Canadians. These ridings included 18 in the Greater Toronto Area that were snatched from the Liberals, enabling Harper to form a majority government.

Speaking at the June 2011 Conservative Party Policy Convention, Senator Irving Gerstein -- who was the Official Agent of the Conservative Fund Canada in the 2006 and 2008 elections, and is currently facing charges laid by the Public Prosecutor against the Conservatives in alleged election spending limit violations and filing of misleading financial documents -- spoke to delegates about the Conservative Party data-base as key to the party's success in the 2011 elections.

Gerstein stated: "The key to the success of our fundraising program is our data-base and our ability to prospect new donors, to remain at the cutting edge of political fund-raising techniques in North America and to effectively use the database for both fund-raising and political purposes...it reaches out to Canadians, identifies those who share our values and mobilizes them. We continue to invest heavily in this program, particularly in the key battleground ridings across the country."

Gerstein pointed out that the database-driven "voter identification and GOTV (Get Out the Vote) programs accounted for the margin of victory on some 40 Conservative MPs. Yes, you heard me. There are roughly 40 Conservative members in the House of Commons who would not be there were it not for our party's extremely effective use of its data-base."

Gerstein emphasized the need for the Conservative Party to continue on this path to aggressively pursue its fund-raising as part and parcel of "innovating and improving" the party's operations stating: "That's what this business of ours is all about and that's what other political parties just don't get. They don't understand that our success is the result of years and years of hard work and investment in the development of an integrated giving program. We have created complex leading edge fund-raising techniques such as data mining, segmentation, targeted marketing and relationship management, all in an effort to move our pool of identified supporters up the support pyramid, from supporters, to members to donors. And you should know that over 60% of our donors today were not, I repeat, were not donors to either legacy party at the time our party was founded in December 2003."

In the Toronto Star of March 2011, Andre Turcotte, Assistant Professor of Communications in the School of Journalism at Carlton University noted that after "failing to defeat the scandal-plagued Martin Liberals, the key strategists around Stephen Harper decided to look for new ways to increase their chances of forming a government. As Ian Brodie, who was a senior member of the Conservative Team and later became Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Harper, suggested, one of the main lessons of 2004 was the necessity to develop a market intelligence structure to ensure that the campaign could be 'more responsive' and 'more nimble'."

Professor Turcotte stated that the Conservatives' new approach was inspired by the electoral success of John Howard in Australia. Of particular interest were the ways Howard managed to end thirteen years of Labour rule in 1996. The Harper strategists studied the segmentation used by Howard's Australian Liberal-National Coalition and its focus on what Party Leader Howard had called "the battlers" or families struggling to raise their kids on a small income. The idea behind this strategy is to use market intelligence to identify key segments of electorate and to develop a highly-targeted Voter ID initiative to ensure that voters fitting the strategic profile go out to vote. It combines the strengths of polling and tele-marketing to create a high-tech version of canvassing."

In 2008, the Harper Campaign successfully focused on less than half a million voters out of about 23 million eligible voters. "It will focus on substantially fewer voters in the upcoming election campaign," Turcotte pointed out.

As part of making the Conservative political campaigns more "responsive" and "nimble", the Conservative Party purchased the CIMS (Constituent Information Management System) database in 2004. This system was then made available to local Conservative Electoral District Associations to be "populated" with information such as the Canadian Electors List, phone numbers and mailing addresses of voters in the riding -- not just Conservative Party members, membership information, donor information and so on. This information in the data base was kept current and then used for "fundraising" and "political purposes" such as micro-targeting of voters before an election.

Micro-targeting is one aspect of political campaigning which is in contempt of the rationale behind Canada's current electoral system. This system is said to uphold Canadians' Charter right to elect and be elected and it justifies depriving everyone of equal access to funds and publicity on the basis that the Charter right is informed by the need for an election to achieve a "clear and coherent expression of the political will in the form of a party government." Today, the ruling elites no longer seek to have a clear and coherent expression of the political will, but merely to get a Party government elected by hook or by crook, no matter what fraud is used to achieve the aim. The current fraudulent practice is to spend a ton of money to achieve victory by appealing to small segments of the voters in a riding that will "make the difference."

If, for example, a party's strategy manager determines that 1,000 votes are required in x riding, the task becomes straightforward -- identify those 1,000 votes and win them. The need to appeal to the mass of voters, whose voting patterns have already been allegedly established, becomes secondary. Low voter turn-out facilitates this approach which is being referred to not only as "micro-targeting" but also "hyper-segmentation." Data is purchased from anyone willing to sell it; all the same sources that are used for other forms of marketing, including the selling of information garnered through cookies following web-surfing of individuals are exploited. Aside from purchasing information to be integrated into the data-bases, one of the reported methods used by the Harper Conservatives and others is that private companies hired during the election campaign call electors masquerading as pollsters, but do not identify themselves as being politically affiliated. The questions can be on all sorts of subjects to gauge a person's opinions and all this information is entered into the database. Another source of information that has come to light is individuals who contact their MP for any reason -- for a passport signature to complaining about a problem -- also have their data logged into the CIMS. The issue is that an enormous amount of data is collected without a person's knowledge.

The use of micro-targeting in the electoral campaigning of the political parties of the establishment is now considered to be state-of-the-art electoral campaigning. It has come into the arena of public discussion primarily from the standpoint of the violation of the right to privacy, and to a lesser degree by highlighting various obvious groups that were being targeted, such as the immigrant communities and the Jewish vote. As is well known, during the period before the recent Federal Election, Minister of Immigration Jason Kenny found himself in a pickle when it was revealed that his office was being used to raise funds specifically from "very ethnic" communities. Similarly in 2007, in an effort to woo Jewish voters, Prime Minister Harper sent Rosh Hashanah greeting cards to some Jewish households and those with "Jewish-sounding names." This not only prompted several recipients to object to the federal privacy commissioner about the violation of their right to privacy but, significantly, raised serious objections to state interference in matters of conscience.

The issue of opposition to state interference in matters of conscience and the right to privacy and the confidentiality of private information are crucial to a society calling itself democratic. Whatever information Elections Canada maintains is subject to privacy considerations. Elections Canada cannot keep information permanently, such as on who has voted and who has not, nor misuse it. Limited use includes research on voter turn-out by demographics, taking random samplings of a certain number of polls where it is necessary to look at who voted and their age, sex, etc. and extrapolate figures from that. That is where, for example, we get the figures on youth voter turnout. The records are then eliminated.

Political parties, however, have no privacy restrictions. Their self-serving domination of the Parliament has enabled them to adopt electoral laws that exempt them from privacy legislation. There is only a stipulation that the voters' list cannot be used for purposes other than political ones and this is interpreted to mean that any means, fair or foul, can be used to get elected so long as electoral laws and financing rules can be interpreted in a manner which is self-serving. In this regard there is nothing even remotely democratic about this electoral process. It is all about circumventing codes of conduct which would render a clear and coherent expression of the political will so as to turn the political will into the legal will in a manner which gives the legal will the consent of the governed.

The Conservatives, Liberals and NDP all have extensive databases on the electors. The introduction of a national voters list and the subsequent amendment of the Canada Elections Act to assign each voter a unique voter ID number was one of the measures taken to facilitate the development of these databases. It is important to note that we are not talking about databases of party supporters, but databases of all the electors and the use of various means to track them and build information on them. At the same time the voter ID number was introduced, making it possible to build reliable databases on individuals, another amendment to the law introduced the practice of Elections Canada poll workers providing political parties with lists of who has voted referred to as bingo cards. The bingo cards are lists of all the ID numbers of voters registered for a specific poll. As they vote, the poll workers check them off and hand them over to the party representatives who come to pick them up. This information is then plugged into their data base and software referred to as "Get Out the Vote" Software (GOTV). The significance here is that the political parties themselves used to have to send out volunteers to keep track of who had turned out to vote. Their scrutineers would record the information and hand it over to campaign workers who would take the information and proceed. Given the demise of party membership and volunteer campaigners, this was a real burden on the parties. They have been relieved of this by Elections Canada workers. No longer do the parties have to worry about collecting the data, save having a few people who drive to the polls to pick up the bingo cards and then transmit that information, probably electronically, to their call centres.

Today there is a push by the big political parties to have Elections Canada post information on-line -- on a party exclusive web portal -- so that the political parties can have instantaneous information as to who has voted and not have to bother with picking up the bingo cards themselves.

We are now at the point where the political parties of the establishment have precise information on who has voted and who has not. It will not be long before political parties will have information about who has voted how. Using 2008 information, the most recent year for which that information is available, there were 68,955 polling stations across the country, for an average of 343 voters per polls (registered voters). When the number of actual voters is divided by the number of polling stations, the number drops to just over 200 voters -- an insignificant amount when you consider running the information through sophisticated mathematical programs that draw together the myriad variables with the information accumulated on each elector.

The cartel-party system is the response of the ruling elite to implement the anti-social offensive and the demand of the financial oligarchy that public right be subordinated to monopoly right. Since these politics cannot be the subject of public debate and discourse, because they will not survive such a thrashing, the political elite have adopted methods of political campaigning that correspond to and contribute to the disintegration of the political culture of the society where political power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands; and where the electoral process itself further marginalizes the polity, as in the case of micro-targeting of selected segments of electors. The political use of the new technologies and their impact on electoral law must be reviewed in light of how they affect the right of the members of the polity to elect and be elected; their right to an informed vote; their right to privacy and the already compromised concept of "free and fair elections."

The trend towards cynical and manipulative "marketing systems" such as micro-targeting of the electorate underscores the need for the working class to lead the people to work for the renewal of the political process so that sovereignty is vested in the people, not the monopolies and their absolutist monopoly rule.