A computer-assisted investigation that connected a government minister to a controversial conservative campaign group that was subsequently found to have distributed disinformation was just one of the voting integrity projects we carried off during the 2022 Australian federal election.

The lobby group is one of the biggest third-party political spenders in the country, and the central theme of its messaging during the 2022 Australian federal election campaign was that what you see with left-wing parties is not what you get. While its mobile billboards showed the Chinese president voting for Labor, its Facebook advertising focussed on the ALP being a puppet of the Greens.

It also deployed this messaging against David Pocock, a former national rugby union captain who was running to be an independent senator for the ACT. In corflutes and online ads, it depicted him as an undercover Green, with one image even showing him ripping open his shirt to reveal a Green t-shirt underneath.

But the secretive nature of the group meant there were plenty of questions about its true motivations - many of which were answered by our investigation.

In the early stages of this research, we collated and analysed the group's Facebook Ads data, and through this, we could see that a trend we had noticed was, in fact, an obsession. The group was gunning for David Pocock, a former national rugby union captain who was running as an independent senate candidate in Australia's smallest jurisdiction.

The next stage of our investigation revealed why.

Using open-source intelligence (OSINT), we began by building a network map of all people and entities closely or tangentially aligned with the group. We then built an algorithm that programmatically converted the dozens of associated ASIC business record PDFs we had collected during this process into a network.

This was a huge leap in the investigation: it found connections (through shared PO Boxes, for example) that highlighted strong points of connection that would have been onerous to discover manually. We call this the ASIC Mapper, and when combined with data obtained through various OSINT methodologies, it sharpened the investigative process significantly.

In this case, it showed us why the group was so obsessed with a lone senate candidate in the ACT: because he was a threat to someone strongly connected to their campaign.

This investigation sparked a significant reaction from the Australian Electoral Commission in the fight against election disinformation.

As part of our research, we were able to reveal that the South Australian Electoral Commission had found the group in breach of that state's anti-disinformation laws.

This occurred when it targeted another independent candidate, this time in the state election campaign which had occurred just a few weeks earlier.

Within days of us publishing a letter from the Commission, which declared some of Advance Australia's campaign material misleading and required it to be withdrawn, the previously reluctant Australian Electoral Commission decided to act against the conservative lobby group.

Despite claiming it had no power to act in many disinformation controversies over the years, it declared that some of Advance Australia's attack ads against Pocock would be likely to mislead or deceive voters, and thus breached the Commonwealth Electoral Act.

The voters of Canberra were similarly motivated to take decisive action against the group, and elected Pocock as the ACT's first independent senator, easily beating the conservative government senator linked to the lobby group.