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5 Down-And-Dirty Tricks Ted Cruz Uses To Fool Voters

5 Down-And-Dirty Tricks Ted Cruz Uses To Fool Voters

Ted Cruz is nasty. Ted Cruz is mean. Ted Cruz is “a huge asshole.”

Ted Cruz is a pretty horrible human being.

That’s the consensus, at least, from notables like former President George W. Bush and Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, commander of the coalition against ISIS.

Cruz has had to wheedle his family to get them to acquiesce – on camera! – that he’s a good guy, even though everyone from his former college roommate to his senatorial colleagues have whispered and shouted that the American public should stay far, far away from this loathsome, odious creature. (Even his “friends” in the Senate don’t want him to be president.)

Now, he’s tasked with saving us from The Donald — a role that, though potentially heroic, has managed only to force Cruz into a spotlight under which his seediness seems to have adopted a new shine. If Donald Trump is America’s premier insult comic, Ted Cruz is its greatest scoundrel. He lies, deceives, and swindles some more. To wit:

Here are 5 dirty tricks Ted Cruz had used to fool voters:

He lied about Ben Carson exiting the race
Dr. Ben Carson decided to not to campaign in New Hampshire and South Carolina after the Iowa Caucus, preferring to return to Florida to (yes, really) get a change of clothes. The Cruz campaign, as detailed by Politifact, took this nugget – that Carson was taking “a very unusual” travel detour – and spun it so that Carson was “taking some time off” from the campaign.

In a series of tweets, emails and voicemails  (and with some assistance from Iowa Congressman Steve King) the campaign inferred and then explicitly stated that Carson had dropped out of the race, which was not the case, and urged caucus-goers to “not waste a vote” on Carson, but instead to vote for Cruz.

Although Cruz apologized, his campaign did acknowledge that “it made a coordinated effort to spread the story.” He ended up winning Iowa, leaving Donald Trump to accuse him of stealing the election.

He used false data and social pressure to trick Iowa residents into voting for him
In another play for Iowa Caucus voters, the Cruz campaign sent out mailers meant to look like official documents warning voters that their participation – or lack thereof – would be recorded and sent to their neighbors, in addition to assigning a grade that matched up with their alleged voting history. Using well-known political science research, the mailers (as seen below), preyed upon voters’ fears of social pressure to get them to vote.

Of course, the “grades” listed on the mailers were all low scores — most of them “F”s:

The mailers used fraudulent “data” – the Cruz campaign made up percentages – and erroneously attributed this “data” to the Iowa Secretary of State and county election clerks, which prompted Iowa’s Secretary of State, Paul D. Pate, to correct the record:

Accusing citizens of Iowa of a “voting violation” based on Iowa Caucus participation, or lack thereof, is false representation of an official act. There is no such thing as an election violation related to frequency of voting. Any insinuation or statement to the contrary is wrong and I believe it is not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses.

Additionally, the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office never “grades” voters. Nor does the Secretary of State maintain records related to Iowa Caucus participation. Caucuses are organized and directed by the state political parties, not the Secretary of State, nor local elections officials. Also, the Iowa Secretary of State does not “distribute” voter records. They are available for purchase for political purposes only, under Iowa Code.” – Paul D. Pate, Iowa Secretary of State

While the tactic has been used before – and an online version of it is being used in China – Cruz takes it to another level. And it’s not something he apologizes for.

He mailed pre-filled “checks” and asked recipients to match them
According to the Huffington Post, the Cruz campaign mailed fake checks across the country to prospective voters meant to entice them to donate money by saying their contribution would be “matched” by “a group of generous supporters.” It was misleading enough for one group to file a complaint with the state attorney general for allegedly violating state law.

The Interceptreports that this tactic “is either impossible, illegal, or a scam,” since individual donations are legally capped at $2,700 for both the primary and general elections ($5,400 total) and the Cruz campaign would need a lot of “generous supporters” willing and able to “match” donations.

That means that the Cruz campaign either disregarded campaign finance law or is funneling all of the money they receive into a super PAC – which would also be illegal. “Super PACs … are allowed to accept unlimited contributions as long as they don’t coordinate directly with campaigns,” reporters Dan Froomkin and Zaid Jilani wrote. The law is explicit in what that means: Candidates running for national office “are not allowed to solicit more than $5,000 in Super PAC contributions from any one person.”

The Cruz campaign, however, is relentless. One mailer with a fake check isn’t enough – there are followups upon followups upon followups – post-its and emails and emails and emails and emails. Cruz tries to come across as casual: The sender’s line is doctored to make it appear that the message was quickly sent from his iPhone. But the barrage of emails instead comes off as desperate, edging on creepy.

His app takes your data and tries to sell your friends onto the “Cruz Crew”
Ted Cruz knows how to work Big Data. On his app, available on both the App Store and Google Play, users have to opt-out of sharing sensitive data, which includes their contact information and their location. This makes it easy for the campaign to amass a trove of sensitive and lucrative information, which it shares with other organizations and analytics companies to better finesse the messages it sends to potential supporters and voters.

The analytics company behind the Cruz operation, Cambridge Analytica, is funded by Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund investor, computer scientist, and the fourth-largest Republican donor in 2014 – and a major backer of Cruz. Mercer has donated at least $11 million to Cruz-related super PACs.

The campaign also uses sophisticated gaming techniques to entice app users to participate, allotting points for specific actions, like sharing messages on social media.

Cambridge Analytica’s formidable system analyzes billions of data points – from voter rolls to Facebook likes, keychain reward programs to Amazon purchases – and then sorts users into one of five personality types, which they use to target messages to the user’s lifestyle, interests, and backgrounds. These discoveries are shared among different departments within the organization, so that a canvasser knocking on doors already knows what the little old lady in the pink house on the corner really purchases at Target.

He photoshopped a beaming Marco Rubio shaking hands with Barack Obama
The Cruz campaign published a website targeting rival Marco Rubio with a doctored photo of him shaking hands with President Obama, captioned with text suggesting it was related to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

When challenged, the Cruz campaign merely shrugged their shoulders, saying it was no big deal; they even gave away their process: “We googled ‘two people supporting amnesty,’” said campaign spokesperson Brian Phillips in an email to Politico.

Ted Cruz is sneaky and smart, and he’s using all the techniques and terabytes he can to stomp his way to the presidency. He likes to stand behind banners that say Trusted. But to those paying attention, the phrase is as transparent a ploy as the rest of his campaign.

Photo: Can we really trust Ted? REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Yes, Those Political Ads Are Following You

Yes, Those Political Ads Are Following You

By Tim Higgins, Bloomberg News (TNS)

WASHINGTON — When Scott Tranter, a Washington political strategy adviser, wants to figure out which TV shows Republican voters are watching, he calls Rentrak, a company that uses information pulled from set-top cable and satellite boxes to track viewing habits. Rentrak’s data help Tranter determine exactly where candidates can get the most value for their ad dollars. Rather than advising campaigns to spend $3,000 on prime-time broadcast slots in Des Moines, he tells them to buy airtime during reruns of “Law & Order” on TNT, at a fraction of the cost.

It’s a strategy devised and perfected by former Barack Obama campaign staffer Carol Davidsen, who joined Rentrak in January to oversee political analytics. “My job isn’t to target TV, my job is to figure out that you’re a vote I care about, and what do you do with your time all day long,” says Tranter, whose firm, Optimus, does work for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, according to federal election records. “Carol’s very good at piecing all of these different technologies together.”

By hiring Davidsen, Rentrak has solidified its hold on the data driving political ad spending for the 2016 campaign.

Incorporated in 1977, the company originally tracked movie rental inventories, then reinvented itself as a monitoring service for box-office sales. As people began watching movies on cable and on demand, Rentrak developed relationships with service providers to get viewership data it sold to movie studios and advertisers.

On Sept. 29, the company announced it would merge with ComScore, a leader in tracking digital media consumption, in a deal valued at more than $800 million. The merger could allow the combined company to track voters across all their screens. “It’s going to be a good catalyst for companies and advertisers to think more along these lines,” says Brent McGoldrick, chief executive officer of Deep Root Analytics. One of Deep Root’s founders, Alex Lundry, is now head of data analytics for Jeb Bush’s campaign.

Near her desk, Davidsen keeps small maps of the swing states that will be most important in deciding the 2016 presidential election. As the director of integration and media targeting for Obama’s 2012 campaign, she created a tool known as “the Optimizer.” It not only used Rentrak numbers to spit out information on what the likeliest voters were watching but also told the campaign’s media buyers where they could reach the most voters for the lowest price.

Before the Optimizer, the campaign — like most of its predecessors — bought airtime during local news and prime-time broadcasts on the theory that those shows reached the most people. Davidsen’s analysis prompted the campaign’s ad buyers to triple their investment in cable ads, a strategy that made the spots 10 percent to 20 percent more effective, in the campaign’s estimation. The results brought as quick and fundamental a shift as Richard Nixon’s dour appearance in his 1960 presidential debate against John F. Kennedy, Davidsen argues. “After Kennedy, everyone got face powder,” she says. “You didn’t debate whether you were going to powder your face before you went on TV. This question was answered.”

In the 2014 midterms, ad buyers for Republican candidates boosted the number of political commercials on local cable by almost 75 percent over the 2010 midterms, according to NCC Media, which sells local ad space for most cable carriers. Channels such as HGTV, FX and the Food Network were suddenly inundated with campaign messages. “I definitely attribute that to better analytics behind TV advertising,” says Timothy Kay, director of political strategy at NCC. “Part of what’s great about the Rentrak data is that it’s given ratings to networks that we haven’t traditionally seen ratings on because of the small sample sizes that are shown by other media survey companies.”

Nielsen and other companies have also developed ways to track audiences across television and the Web. Smaller companies such as Rovi and FourthWall Media are also getting into the tracking business. But Rentrak has a unique advantage: its access to viewer data from markets across the country. By the end of the year, it expects to track about a fifth of U.S. TV viewing households.

CEO Bill Livek is betting the company’s investment in political advertising will pay off beyond the 2016 election. Businesses are trying to mimic the microtargeting techniques developed by political operatives, and Livek expects they’ll hire people who have relationships with Rentrak. “The smartest minds in America, and I mean that literally, work on these political campaigns,” he says. “Once the election is done they’ve got to get real work, and they end up working at some of the major brands.”

With a team of eight, Davidsen is trying to solve one of the problems that bedeviled her when she was on the campaign side in 2012: how to make sure the same people don’t see a candidate’s ads too many times. Even with its sophisticated analytics, the Obama campaign ultimately realized it was bombarding 6 percent of households in Ohio with more than 60 ads a week.

“That was not the desired intent,” Davidsen says, noting research that suggests voters can be provoked into voting against a candidate if they’re annoyed by seeing too many of the same TV ads. She says ad blitzes can bedevil better-funded campaigns, like Hillary Clinton’s or Bush’s. “The Hillary campaign’s problem is not going to be the lack of budget,” she says. “It’s going to be avoiding these 60 exposures.”

Playing with information goes back to childhood for Davidsen, who as a girl loved organizing her box of crayons more than coloring with them. “I just would ask questions of the crayon box, then organize the crayons to the answers to the questions. What are the feminine colors vs. the masculine colors? What are the citrusy colors?” she recalls. “I have a natural inclination to sort.”

Photo: Marco Rubio is one presidential candidate who is using firms that follow web users’ interests in order to target them for ads for him. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

White House Report On Data Collection Calls For Privacy Protections

White House Report On Data Collection Calls For Privacy Protections

By Kathleen Hennessey, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — A new White House report on privacy and data collection says the mass collection of information is “saving lives” but calls for additional safeguards in how personal information is stored and collected.

The report, issued Thursday, is the result of a three-month review led by White House adviser John Podesta and administration officials. President Barack Obama called for the assessment of so-called “big data” amid pressure over revelations about U.S. spy agencies collecting data on phone records.

The review did not focus on collecting data for intelligence, however, opting instead to review policies in other government agencies, the private sector and education.

“As more data is collected, analyzed, and stored on both public and private systems, we must be vigilant in ensuring that balance is maintained between government and citizens, and revise our laws accordingly,” the report said.

The document praises the use of big data to assist in disaster recovery and in medicine, and describes the expansion of analytics as a potential economic boon to the United States.

But it also outlines six policy recommendations to the president, including reviving the push for a consumer privacy bill of rights that would set standards for how personal information is used.

The report also calls for the passage of a cybersecurity bill that would set a national standard for handling a data “breach.”

The report endorses the notion of extending privacy protections to non-U.S. citizens and argues that information collected on students in schools should be used only for educational purposes. It also called for amending the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to ensure online content has the same legal protections as other information.

The report also warned against discrimination that can result when data are mishandled and urged the federal government to guard against cases when information is used to categorize or sort citizens into groups.

“We must prevent new modes of discrimination that some uses of big data may enable, particularly with regard to longstanding civil rights protections in housing, employment and credit,” according to a synopsis of the report.

The White House said the Commerce Department would take the lead on crafting legislation and policy related to the issues.

©afp.com / Indranil Mukherjee