
New tapes reveal Cambridge Analytica CEO’s boasts of voter suppression - byproxy
https://www.opendemocracy.net/brexitinc/paul-hilder/they-were-planning-on-stealing-election-explosive-new-tapes-reveal-cambridg
======
g8oz
Also worthy of note is Cambridge Analytica's trolling of Nigeria's 2015
presidential election:

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/04/cambridge-
an...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/04/cambridge-analytica-
used-violent-video-to-try-to-influence-nigerian-election)

Amoral doesn't begin to describe these people.

~~~
g8oz
Oh and they were busy in Kenya as well.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-
opinions/wp/2018/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-
opinions/wp/2018/03/20/how-cambridge-analytica-poisoned-kenyas-democracy/)

------
rdiddly
_" SCL/CA has never undertaken voter suppression and there is no evidence to
the contrary."_

Hilarious - like the guilty parties in 50 years of
cop/detective/courtroom/true-crime shows, he doesn't just stop with "we didn't
do it" but feels compelled to tack on the part about "...and you don't have
any evidence we did it!"

~~~
unityByFreedom
Apparently in Kaiser's recording, Nix (then CEO), described CA's capabilities
as voter suppression.

Does the article link the recording? I wasn't able to find it while browsing
by phone.

~~~
rdiddly
Not that I found. There's a link to the older ones at Channel4.com. And they
refer to the newer recordings ( _" In explosive recordings that Kaiser made in
the summer of 2016, excerpts from which are published exclusively by
openDemocracy today..."_) but no link.

~~~
unityByFreedom
Weird. Thanks for confirming.

------
creaghpatr
> They talked about ‘honey traps’ that used Ukrainian prostitutes and boasted
> of secret teams who “ghosted in, did the work, ghosted out” of countries,
> and “put information into the bloodstream of the internet… with no branding,
> so it’s unattributable, untrackable”

You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and write
lies?

[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-
and-t...](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-tell-
lies)

------
trhway
>In the recordings, Nix describes one of his major clients, Republican
presidential candidate Ted Cruz, as a "fascist".

------
dwd
This was a bit of an eye opener on how much information Robert Mueller's team
has and could be an indication of what is in the many sealed indictments in
the DC citcuit given he flipped Sam Patton.

On the Brexit side it's probably time to stop and step back to investigate
whether the vote was unduly influenced with foreign cash or interferance.

------
andrewla
The story is written in long form, so it's difficult to figure out what
methods of "voter suppression" were used. I hesitate to cry "fake news" here,
but only barely.

Typically, in my experience, "voter suppression" refers to techniques designed
to prevent certain targeted groups from voting -- things like voter ID laws
are often accused of having this motive, or closing polling stations, or
limiting polling hours, or refusing to protect workers from discipline for
taking the time to vote. These are almost always structural in nature;
creating barriers that prevent people from voting.

It appears that the voter suppression they are referring to is a completely
different beast -- they reference this [1] Bloomberg article, which says:

> “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior
> official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly:
> idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s
> invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the
> Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The
> parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and
> harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young
> women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super
> predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent
> black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.

These are not "voter suppression" in the sense used above; this is just dirty
campaigning; or arguably even just campaigning. For a long time the fact of
the matter is that a campaign, especially a presidential campaign, is trying
to increase the turnout of your supporters, and decrease the turnout of your
opponent's supporters -- nobody is convincing anybody to change sides;
everyone is just trying to convince people to not vote. As long as it is done
through non-structural means, convincing people not to vote is a perfectly
reasonable persuasion technique, and it pains me to see the marketing hacks at
Cambridge Analytica elevated to some sort of gurus that can magically
hypnotize people.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-
th...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-
bunker-with-12-days-to-go)

~~~
moorhosj
>As long as it is done through non-structural means, convincing people not to
vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique

What if it is done fraudulently? For example, lying to people about when/where
to vote or lying about your opponent's positions. That doesn't seem like a
reasonable technique to me.

~~~
andrewla
That's a ridiculous straw man. None of the cases cited above or the referenced
article refer to any techniques even bordering on that.

I suspect those techniques are rarely used because when they are exposed as
being fraudulent they are massively counterproductive to voter apathy.

~~~
moorhosj
You made this comment:

==As long as it is done through non-structural means, convincing people not to
vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique==

I took your own generic statement and asked you to further qualify it. I did
this by posing a question (opposite of a straw man) and applying it to a
hypothetical scenario (to make it realistic). I never accused anyone of doing
it or claimed it was something you cited. I was trying to understand if there
should be some type of qualifier on the phrase "convincing people not to vote
is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique" because it seems to me that it
isn't a universal truth.

------
tick_tock_tick
Sounds like they ran negative campaign ads? Hardly voter suppression and
trivializes it by trying to equate the two.

~~~
byproxy
Well, I wish I was able to fit the entire title in the submission. If
anything, I feel that the bribery aspect is more damning.

>"You can spend $10 million on an election. Or we can send one of our guys in
to go offer the leader of the opposition a bribe, you know, three weeks before
polling. It's a very good way to win an election.”

~~~
m0zg
I wonder if that's what happened to Bernie Sanders. Immediately after his
defeat in the primary he bought yet another house, his third. The timing is
just too suspicious to be coincidental.

[https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/bernie-sanders-
summe...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/bernie-sanders-summer-house)

~~~
dsmithn
From the article: "Jane told Seven Days that they had recently sold a house in
Maine that had belonged to her family since the 1900s, and used the proceeds
to purchase the new property, which is located in North Hero (population 803,
as of the 2010 census)."

Why would he have bought a house when he was planning on moving to the White
House?

------
hirundo
> Nix ... engineered a highly successful grassroots campaign to "increase
> apathy" so that young Afro-Caribbeans would not vote.

1\. He did this via speech. Free speech is a good thing even when the speech
is bad, even when spoken by foreigners, even when it's illegal.

2\. To the extent that this campaign succeeds it will tend to remove voters
that are a) more suggestive, b) more prone to apathy. That would seem to
improve the overall quality of the voting pool.

The drive to get everyone to vote seems to be more about justifying the result
than improving it.

~~~
pianoben
I'm astonished to hear this said so openly. Whom is a representative democracy
supposed to represent - only educated, upper-class, "quality" folks?

We rightly consigned that idea to the dust bin, along with poll taxes,
literacy tests, etc. If you want to improve the _citizenry_, a better approach
would be to support civic education.

edit: s/What/Whom/

~~~
kanox
> I'm astonished to hear this said so openly.

Increasing "voter apathy" is a 100% legitimate democratic tactic, even for
foreign powers.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
No, it isn't.

The whole point of democracy is to canvas opinion.

If you influence opinion on an industrial scale using significant sums of cash
that aren't available to most citizens, that's not true democracy - that's you
buying power with money.

