Exit Interview: Liberal Party of Canada national membership secretary Matthew Certosimo

It was an ironic twist of fate that delegates to the Liberal Party of Canada’s 2012 biennial in Ottawa would vote to create a supporter system and elect a decided supporter system skeptic – Matthew Certosimo – as national membership secretary, with the task of creating and overseeing the system in time for the 2013 leadership race.

Two years later, with over 300,000 members and supporters having been recruited by the end of the leadership race, Certosimo is leaving office a confirmed supporter convert. Liberal delegates to February’s biennial convention in Montreal will elect his successor, and I recently spoke with Certosimo about his term, the supporter experiment, and how the next membership secretary can carry it forward.

(See my previous exit interview with outgoing party president Mike Crawley)

The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

How would you describe the role of membership secretary?

I always felt from the beginning, and this was reinforced during my term, that is was a combination of cheerleader – someone whose job is to encourage participation in the party – and the rules person, an individual in a secretary capacity who works hard to ensure that those who become members and supporters do so in compliance with the rules and under the relevant bylaws, and the decision-making that falls on the shoulders of the national membership secretary to interpret the rules and issue interpretation bulletins. A combination of cheerleader/chief recruiter and rules person.

What were the goals you had set for yourself going in?

I talked during  my campaign about connect, engage and inspire being the three pillars of why I wanted the job.

I felt we had to do a better job of connecting the party at every level to enhance our ability to be more than just a party, but a movement. We had to do a better job welcoming people when they joined our movement and engage them. And third, we had to do things as a party and a movement that would make people want to be a part of the effort.

Some of that would fall to the parliamentary wing of the party, of course, but I felt the party itself, and the national membership secretary specifically, needed to keep the objective of motivation, of inspiring our supporters and members, at the front of centre of how we approach what we do.

And looking back now, how do you feel you did against those three pillars?

Frankly, I think we did a great job. The whole team, the table offices and the board, all deserve credit in this regard. We’ve had a pretty heavy agenda over the two years since the last biennial. I was fortunate to have great support from the board, the table officers, and especially our president, Mike (Crawley).

Right away, with the assistance of Rob Jamieson and the staff at the Ottawa office, we developed and implemented what I called Take Notice. In essence, it was a regular, automatic e-mail communication to every riding in the country with updates on new members, volunteers and donors, and eventually we added supporters. Before people didn’t know what was happening, they didn’t know how to use Liberalist to get updates, and there was a lot of concern about sharing this kind of information between the centre and the ridings. For both pragmatic and symbolic reasons, my first initiative after I became national membership secretary was to launch this communications vehicle. I heard across the country that the ridings were very appreciative of this; they really felt as though it enhanced the connection between the party office and each of the ridings.

On engagement, the entire effort around the launch of supporters was, of course, an engagement and recruitment initiative. I think we could say objectively that the supporter experiment was a tremendous success in engaging people beyond the narrow band of those who would be prepared to become a member, and encouraged them in participating at a level the party had never seen before.

It’s hard for me to comment on the inspiration. That would be for others to say. In terms of how I conducted myself, I tried to ensure the way we did what we did was always consistent with the principles of inclusion, transparency and openness, and what we walked the talk, and in doing so, I’m hoping that inspired people to trust and continue to be involved in our effort.

Looking back at our first leadership race under the supporter system, what worked well and what didn't?

We had to reconcile the idealistic objective of the supporter category being an open, accessible way for people who wouldn’t want to become members to get involved with our movement, with the more pragmatic concern many in the party had with the security and verifiability and legitimacy of the election of our leader.

Those are potentially conflicting principles, but we reconciled them through what I called the funnel model. It's wide open at the front end (letting supporters sign up with minimal data provided), and as we narrow it down towards the vote we increase the security around the legitimacy of the vote by requiring a supporter to register for the vote.

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have had to, for an online vote, put members through the registration process. If our system had the benefit of being built and programmed so that, when members went into our system, all the security measures related to their identity were in place, they wouldn’t have had to go through that process. If we’re looking at improvements for next time, we should lay the groundwork for members to be pre-registered, and have all the security measures around identity and so in place in our system.

Overall, I don’t think anyone can argue that having almost 130,000 people vote directly for the leader of our party was anything other than a tremendous success. It was the biggest national leadership election in our country’s history, and it was an accomplishment I believe we as a party should be tremendously proud of.

How can we continue building the supporter system outside of a leadership race?

I believe the supporter experiment taught us that those who had said different people want to engage in our party in different ways, and that we need to have structures in place with respect to that, were right. And I say that with humility and as a bit of a mea culpa, as I am a reformed supporter skeptic. I did not support the adoption of the supporter category, but I became a believer that it was the right decision by the party.

I think the next step is to build on the principles of a multi-level engagement model that allows people to become involved in our party at different levels and in different ways, as suits their particular preference. The free, easily accessible, relatively modest engagement category that is the supporter can be maintained and be a way of encouraging people to remain connected to the party, coming to the party with their ideas and the like, without taking out a membership.

And there are rights that come along with a membership, such as choosing candidates for the local nomination for the riding. That’s an incentive for someone to go up to the next level of engagement. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable and wise model to have in place.

Whether or not the party wants to consider further reforms of the membership model to make it easier for people to become members is, I think, something that deserves some further thought. When I ran for national membership secretary I was of the view that, rather than adopting a supporter category, we should look at making membership free. On reflection, I don’t think we need to do that – we can keep the supporter category as the free model of participation and charge something for membership, but we could consider whether it should be a membership fee or part and parcel with participation in the Victory Fund.

The main thing though is that we not be rigid in the categories or the different ways in which people can engage; I think that’s the key lesson from the supporter experience.

What would you say is the biggest challenge facing your successor?

The good news for my successor is that, unlike the last two years, he or she won’t have to launch the supporter category, build the infrastructure and then oversee the election of a leader.

They will be in place though as we move through the nomination process. Whomever takes on the role of national membership secretary will have to be involved in overseeing membership-related considerations relating to participation in nomination meetings across the country. They don’t run those meetings, but they must ensure the national membership registry is in place so there are limited disputes over the right to vote in nominations.

What advice would you give your successor?

Have fun. To be honest, and this is not a word of exaggeration, I was so inspired by this party over the last two years, and in particular the way people came forward and achieved the adoption of the supporter system, and then helped build what was ultimately a supporter category of over 300,000 people.

The leadership process that followed, all things considered, and despite the fact it was the first time we did something like this, was relatively pain-free because of the way the party rallied behind, accepted, and made work the supporter/member, one member one vote national leadership election. The effort of the new leader and the work the new leader has been doing since is the natural next step in what was really an inspirational evolution in our party’s history.

For the next national membership secretary, and the table offices and the board generally, it’s a fun time to be part of this movement, and I hope they’ll take the kind of inspiration from it that I was able to for the last two years.

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Liberal Party needs time to do supporter vote right

To paraphrase an old proverb, beware newspaper columnists bearing advice. That certainly applies to John Ibbitson’s column in the Globe this morning, where he takes the Liberal Party to task for setting a 41 day cutoff for supporter (and member) sign-ups to be eligible to vote in the leadership race next April.

Ibbitson starts by applauding the party members for voting to open up the party by creating the supporter system at the January convention, and then attacks the national board decisions that “undermine the very notion of the supporter category.” What has him upset?

…that privilege will end 41 days before the April 14 vote is announced. Mike Crawley, the party’s president, explained Sunday that the party had decided to make the cutoff for both supporters and members that far in advance, so that lists could be finalized, checked for possible acts of fraud, and then shared with all candidates.

For one thing, Ibbitson betrays a lack of understanding of the process. The national board didn’t set the cutoff date for supporters, the members did. It was part of the constitutional amendment we passed in January that created the supporter category, and amended the constitution to include this requirement for voting eligibility, section (63)(2)(A):

been a supporter of the Party for the 41 days immediately preceding the day of the Leadership Vote;

This applies to both supporters and members. So this was part of the system as passed by the delegates Ibbitson praised in January, and the national board can’t override it without asking the membership to pass a constitutional amendment, which given the timing would require an extraordinary convention like we held last summer on the leadership timeline.

That bit of process aside, even if it was feasible, doing away with the cutoff or putting it mere days before the vote, as Ibbitson seems to propose, would be an absolutely horrible idea that would be setting up the party for a bungled leadership vote. And I’m sure Ibbitson and his fellow pundits would have some buzz-killing fun with that.

Much of the future of the party is riding both on the success of this leadership vote and the supporter system, and it’s important that we get both right. And it’s important that everyone have confidence in the fairness and accuracy of the system.

That means ensuring that the potentially hundreds of thousands of supporters that are signed-up have their identities vetted and verified, so we’re confident that they’re real, they meet the requirements, and it’s actually them voting. I published an interview recently with Liberal membership chair Matthew Certosimo on this process.

And with a pool of potentially hundreds of thousands of voters, the party will need to build and design a voting process (either online, phone, mail-in or physical polls, TBD) with the capacity to handle the possible turnout and conduct the vote in a fair, transparent, open and efficient manner.

Accomplishing both of these things will take time, which makes the 41 day window between the sign-up cutoff and voting day essential. It will take time to complete the vetting of possible voters, and ensure the capacity to allow them all to vote is there (the media savaged the NDP for the delays in their leadership vote due to a denial of service attack).

Ibbitson, who spent a lot of time covering U.S. politics and often lets it influence his writing, wants a primary-style system. But he should be familiar enough with U.S. primaries to know that, despite the messaging by some when proposing it, the Liberal proposal was never that close to U.S.-style primaries. And no party can realistically adopt such a system on their own, for reasons varying from lack of resources to the need to prevent participating in different party’s processes. A proper primary system would see an impartial body such as Elections Canada registering Canadians for parties or as independents, and managing the votes in a non-partisan manner.

Until the unlikely day when all parties agree to buy into such a non-partisan managed system, cutoff dates to allow for verification of details and the provisioning of vote casting resources will be necessary. It’s the only way to run the vote fairly and without chaos.

And as for Ibbitson’s patronizing endnote…

Perhaps the federal party leadership failed to notice that the Liberal Party was defeated in the Quebec provincial election last week even as the Liberal government in B.C. was pummelled by a string of cabinet ministers announcing they would not be running in the next election and the Ontario Liberals failed to win a by-election that would have given Dalton McGuinty a majority government. The Liberals are running out of things to run.

… he may have failed to notice that the “Liberal government in B.C.” hasn’t been overly Liberal for some time and is riddled with former Stepen Harper advisors. He may have failed to notice that Jean Charest is a former Progressive Conservative and his party confounded his fellow pundits, the pollsters and popular expectations to hold the PQ to a slim minority government. And he may have failed to notice that the Kitchener seat was a long-shot for the Ontario Liberals (although their finish was very disappointing) and they won Vaughan, the other seat up for grabs (and held by the Conservatives federally) in resounding fashion.

But we musn’t spoil the narrative, fictional though it may be.

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10,000 Liberal supporters a very real number: Certosimo

Following-up on my post earlier this week about some of my concerns around the Liberal Party of Canada’s supporter sign-up process, I spoke today with Liberal membership secretary Matthew Certosimo about the process and the philosophy behind how it’s set up.

In summary, he feels the 10,000 supporters signed-up in the first month figure is a firm and very real number, due to the multi-stage verification process I’ll outline. And the number continues to grow. The party feels pre-checking the box is a standard industry practice for companies that communicate via web forms, but he will look at adding more language, either on the petition form or through a link, to illuminate just what being a supporter means.

More broadly, he described a system to bring supporters into the party that acts as a funnel at the top to bring in every possible, and gets narrower down the funnel to ensure that a) they actually do want to be supporters, and later b) that they’re qualified to vote for leader. That’s to deal with the two competing objectives of the system: wanting to broaden the tent while also needing to ensure the veracity of the list.

He described a multi-stage process. First, someone takes the first step to be a supporter by signing-up on the Web page or through a petition or other outreach method. At that point, they're providing minimal information and may not know too much about what that entails.  They’ll then receive a follow-up e-mail from party president Mike Crawley asking them to confirm that they do indeed want to be a supporter that provides more information about what that involves, and asks them for more information, as well as to affirm they support Liberal principles and aren’t a member of another party.

If they don’t provide the follow-on information, they may stay on a mailing-list but they don’t become official supporters. And while there’s the possibility of people ending up on the list that didn’t intend to be, Certosimo said this second stage is where they can ask off. And he said while 10,000 supporters signed-up in the first month, he said only 30 said they were on the list in error and wanted off. A pretty low error rate.

And before any supporter will get a ballot to vote in a leadership race, he said there will be a further process of verification and credentialing. Those rules are to be determined by an ad hoc committee on leadership rules. The method of leadership voting is still to be determined. Verification that a supporter exists and is qualified to vote would be easier to do if there’s physical (as opposed to online voting), but physical polling would be a difficult logistical exercise given the potential size of a voting pool that includes supporters. But Certosimo said whatever process is decided on will have to be one in which everyone can have confidence in the veracity of the supporter list. Campaigns, as is usual in a leadership race, will also have the opportunity to challenge the credentials of any voter.

Certosimo stressed that he pushed to launch the supporters system in May because he wanted the summer as a period to experiment and work the kinks out of the system, before leadership concerns begin to influence everything in the fall. He indicated the anecdotal reports I’ve heard of false positives were likely a result of unverified new supporter sign-ups being forwarded daily to riding presidents, along with new member and donor data. The supporter data is now being forwarded every 12 days, so it has undergone the preliminary verification to weed-out any false positives from the data riding associations are getting.

On my specific concerns about the supporter box on petitions, he said they discussed the pre-click decision and they felt it was an industry-standard practice employed by other companies that conduct these sorts of communications, and emphasized again the idea is to bring in as many people as possible in phase one, and verify their intentions in the next phase. As for the lack of information on the petition about what being a supporter is, he said they want to keep that page tight and much of that information comes in the verification e-mail. He will, though, look to see if more information could be added, perhaps via a link.

So, in short, 10,000 is a real number and is getting higher, backed by a multi-stage verification process.

I feel better knowing that there are multiple stages of verification, and the low false positive rate is also very encouraging. I would still prefer we ask people to make a more informed decision up front rather than funnel them in and then verify, but I understand where they’re coming from. And I’m glad there will be further verification before anyone gets a leadership ballot.

As mentioned that process is still being determined, and it will be incredibly important. My fear is that an online process could lead to unscrupulous organizers signing-up multiple people, either invented or real without their knowledge, and voting all their PINs online. Whatever process is created will need to ensure these are real people, and they are actually casting their own ballot, without coercion. While physical voting locations would be a major logistical challenge, it may be the only way to do this thing with confidence.

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Liberals should reconsider supporter opt-in process

While I didn’t support the creation of the Liberal “supporter”category that allows anyone that’s not a member of another party to vote for the party’s next leader without buying a membership, now that we have the system I do want it to be a success. And the integrity of the supporter system is going to be an important part of the next leadership race.

In a recent message to Liberals, the party touted the sign-up of over 10,000 supporters in the first month the system was up and running. It’s an impressive number, and I know many ridings are making signing up supporters a real priority, going door to door in their communities in examples of the kind of grass-roots activism and campaigning that will get the Liberal Party back on track.

I am concerned, though, about how real that 10,000 number is. That’s because another way many people are being signed-up are through the widely-circulated, issue-based petition drives coming out of the Liberal office in Ottawa. The petitions are mainly a data gathering exercise; the party wants to find out what issues you care about, and then send you targeted messaging (and fundraising pitches) in the future. It all makes good sense and is part of modern campaigning.

The problem, though, is evident in this petition drive on the closure of Coast Guard stations. As you can see, when you land on the petition page the box to automatically become a registered Liberal supporter with the signing of the petition is pre-clicked.

This raises several obvious concerns. For one, how many people don’t notice that box and just click submit, just wanting to express their opinion on the petition issue? Also, there’s no information or link to just what a supporter is or what that entails. There’s nothing, for example, about the commitment to “shared Liberal ideals” we heard about when creating the supporter category; also missing is the requirement to affirm you’re not a member of any other political party.

I’ve already been hearing anecdotal reports of riding associations getting lists of new supporters from Ottawa and phoning them to follow-up (outreach that’s great to see), only to have many of them surprised to find themselves on a supporters list. They’d just wanted to sign a petition.

I want to see us get this supporters thing right, and we need to avoid alienating potential supporters by not getting their informed consent. We want people to make the concious decision to become supporters, and we need to give that meaning. I hope we’ll re-visit pre-checking that box, and add more language or a link to more information on what being a supporter actually means.

Big numbers make nice headlines, but informed and committed supporters are what will make a difference.

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