FOREIGN INTERFERENCE, PART 02*: Meanwhile, in Alberta…

FOREIGN INTERFERENCE, PART 02*: Meanwhile, in Alberta…

FOREIGN INTERFERENCE, TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLY | PART 02 | PRIME ROGUE INC.

American political operatives pitched the software. U.S. officials met separatists. The records are connected by an Alberta campaign—not by proven U.S. government direction.

Kevin J.S. Duska Jr. | Prime Rogue/The Signal Cage | Calgary, Alberta | November 1, 2026

The U.S. Embassy warned Canadians against influencing American politics. In Alberta, Michigan Republican organizers had already promoted voter-mobilization technology to separatist leaders, while U.S. State Department officials had separately met representatives seeking support for independence. Prime Rogue’s technical investigation identifies a related Alberta voter-search application on Microsoft Azure infrastructure in Virginia. Is this foreign election interference? The evidence establishes cross-border political involvement. It does not settle that legal question.

Reader’s note — what we found, and what others found first.

Each major section ends with an In plain English explanation. Original scoops are credited to the journalists who made them. Prime Rogue’s independent contribution is the subsequent forensic reconstruction of the 10X Votes application and a separate archival finding concerning Centurion’s event-registration system. Technical association is not proof of personal culpability, and foreign political influence is not automatically unlawful interference.

The finding: two American channels, one Canadian political question

There is no need to imagine American involvement in Alberta’s separatist debate. The public record shows two different forms of it. In 2025, representatives of the Alberta Prosperity Project met U.S. State Department officials in Washington three times. In January 2026, Michigan Republican political technology representatives met Alberta separatist organizers in Calgary to pitch 10X Votes software. Separately, a 10X Votes web application found to contain records about roughly 2,000 Albertans operated on Microsoft Azure infrastructure in Virginia, according to Prime Rogue’s public-record reconstruction.

The meetings in Washington are government contacts. The Calgary pitch is private political-technology activity. The Virginia hosting is technical evidence about an application, not a finding about who in Washington controlled it. These are separate evidentiary tracks; no document reviewed here joins them into a single U.S. government-directed operation.

The distinction matters precisely because U.S. officials have warned Canadians against meddling in American politics. Canada’s government describes open diplomacy and political advocacy as ordinary foreign influence, while foreign interference involves covert, deceptive or coercive activity by a foreign state or those acting for it. Whether an identified activity violates election, referendum, privacy or foreign-influence law is a further question requiring the relevant statutory test and facts.

In plain English:

Americans were involved in Alberta’s political debate in at least two documented ways. That is a finding about influence and participation, not a verdict that the U.S. government ran an unlawful campaign.

Who actually established these facts first?

Luke LeBrun of PressProgress

first documented the Michigan political network and obtained Ambassador Pete Hoekstra’s response in May. LeBrun identified 10X Votes’ associations with Republican organizers and the product’s political promotion during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign. Hoekstra said he had promoted 10X Votes in his capacity as Michigan Republican Party chair, but denied awareness of its relationship with Alberta separatists and denied a personal financial connection to the app.

Carrie Tait, Grant Robertson and Nathan VanderKlippe of The Globe and Mail

then reported the closed-door Calgary software pitch and obtained accounts from people present. Their October investigation also examined discussions between Alberta separatists and U.S. officials, including contested claims about resources and possible American assistance. The Financial Times had independently reported the three State Department meetings in January.

Rory White of Canada’s National Observer

discovered the smaller 10X Votes subdomain containing about 2,000 Albertans’ records.

Jeremy Appel at The Orchard

did critical on-the-ground reporting, and witnessed Elections Alberta’s intervention at the Centurion launch, which made this story possible in the first place.

Jen Gerson at The Line

documented her earlier warning to election authorities about the much larger exposure. Their reporting provided the public-interest basis for further investigation.

Prime Rogue

did not discover the Alberta voter-list scandal, invent the Michigan political connection or uncover the State Department meetings. Our original work concerns the Azure hosting and software lineage, along with a separately archived Centurion Wix reservation trace. The sources and corrections are available in the public evidence repository.

In plain English:

The first reporters found the people, the data exposure and the political contacts. Prime Rogue subsequently examined the infrastructure and archived records. A credible investigation should say which journalist found which piece.

Track one: what was discussed in Washington

In January, the Financial Times reported that Alberta Prosperity Project leaders had met State Department personnel three times since April 2025 and hoped to pursue further contacts. Its reporting included discussion of a proposed US$500-billion credit facility, which U.S. officials said they had not offered. The State Department characterized the contacts as routine civil-society meetings with no commitments; the White House likewise said no support had been promised. These positions are material to interpreting the meetings, not footnotes to be omitted.

The Globe and Mail subsequently reported meeting dates of April 22, September 29 and December 16, 2025, and described internal disagreements among Alberta separatist figures over claims involving oil and water. APP lawyer Jeff Rath disputed descriptions of resource-related proposals as subjects of the State Department talks. These are allegations and contested recollections, not agreed terms of a bilateral transaction.

There was also public American political encouragement. Sean Boynton of Global News reported Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s January description of an independent Alberta as a potential U.S. partner. A public comment by a Cabinet secretary is attributable political speech; it is not evidence that his department financed an Alberta campaign. In July, Ambassador Hoekstra told Mackenzie Gray of Global News that the administration was not meeting and strategizing with separatists. That denial of strategizing must be read alongside the previously reported State Department contacts and the department’s characterization of them as routine meetings.

The substantive question is what, if anything, went beyond listening, talking and issuing public remarks: written commitments; staff tasking; financing; introductions; technical assistance; or instructions to campaign actors. None of those additional relationships is established by the meetings alone.

In plain English:

American officials met Canadians seeking Alberta independence, and senior U.S. officials discussed Alberta publicly. Those contacts are real. They do not establish that Washington funded or directed the separatist campaign.

Track two: Michigan Republicans brought an election tool to Calgary

The Globe reported that a delegation associated with 10X Votes travelled to Calgary in January 2026 to demonstrate technology developed for Republican voter mobilization in Michigan. A participant identified co-founder Drew Wierda at the meeting. Separatist organizer David Parker brokered the encounter and advocated adopting the technology. According to the Globe’s interviews, Alberta Prosperity Project figures expressed concerns about using their membership database, and the proposed use of that list was not agreed at that meeting.

LeBrun’s PressProgress reporting had already situated the company in a recognizably Republican political network. Drew Born and Wierda were associated with the venture; Born had promoted Alberta annexation online. 10X Votes was promoted within the 2024 Trump electoral ecosystem, including by then-Michigan GOP chair Pete Hoekstra, now the U.S. ambassador to Canada. Hoekstra acknowledged that past promotional role but denied knowledge of the Alberta relationship. Association with Trump’s political network does not establish a Trump administration instruction.

Crucially, the app’s claimed success in turning out voters is marketing or partisan testimony, not a demonstrated causal measurement. We do not infer that 10X Votes changed Michigan’s 2024 result or Alberta’s 2026 referendum. We also do not assume that the Alberta Prosperity Project’s membership list was transferred to the company simply because it was discussed.

Jack Farrell of Global News subsequently reported that Premier Danielle Smith’s office disclaimed knowledge of the Calgary meeting and said she opposed separation or American statehood. The premier’s response is relevant because an organizer’s political associations are not evidence of authorization by the provincial government.

In plain English:

The Michigan team pitched election software to Alberta separatists. Some organizers were interested; others resisted providing their list. That is a documented attempt to influence political organizing, not proof of every proposed data transfer or of government sponsorship.

Track three: what Prime Rogue’s technical records add

The technical question is narrower than the political story, but the answer is consequential. White’s National Observer investigation found roughly 2,000 searchable Alberta records at skcn.10xvotes.com in May. Prime Rogue later reconstructed the publicly visible infrastructure behind that particular host using October 22 DNS observations, certificate records and archived pages.

The DNS chain resolved from skcn.10xvotes.com to 10xvotes-skcn.azurewebsites.net, then to Microsoft’s App Service scale unit waws-prod-blu-319 and the Azure East US region, which Microsoft locates in Virginia. The recorded IP was 20.119.0.3. Matching Azure custom-domain verification values for skcn, wi, pa and hn support a shared subscription or administrative environment for those four apps. Michigan’s mi app shared a scale unit and software traits, but no matching `asuid.mi` record was observed; its presence in the same subscription therefore is not independently verified.

Archived pages show that skcn used an ASP.NET Core login form submitted to the application host and referenced the file MiFamilyVotingWebsite.styles.css, a software clue tying the Alberta-facing application to the Michigan project. Related archived state-app scripts used a server-side voter-search endpoint. This is evidence of U.S.-hosted application processing, not of where the persistent database was physically stored or of the route by which every record was originally acquired.

This distinction was learned the hard way. Prime Rogue’s June 1, 2026 analysis was retracted or superseded after it incorrectly attributed all jurisdiction traffic to Cloudflare, misidentified the `auth` host as Vercel, interpreted `skcn` as Saskatchewan and misstated the status of the jurisdiction certificates. The corrected October 22–23 analysis identifies Microsoft Azure App Service and Auth0 where applicable. The older article must not be read as evidence of the superseded claims. Read the corrected forensic report and its methodology.

In plain English:

The app serving searches about Albertans ran on American infrastructure, in an environment connected to 10X Votes’ U.S. deployments. That makes the cross-border processing question concrete. It does not prove where the database sat, that 2.9 million records were uploaded into this app or that an American government employee operated it.

The voter-list scandal was larger—but it was not the same dataset

The Centurion Project’s much larger controversy concerned the province’s protected List of Electors, containing information relating to approximately 2.9 million people. Elections Alberta’s April 30 public chronology says it obtained credible information on April 27, issued a cease-and-desist direction April 28, served organizers at an April 29 event and secured an emergency injunction the morning of April 30. It attributed the unauthorized use to a copy provided to the Republican Party of Alberta, a legitimate list recipient. Elections Alberta stated its own database had not been breached.

Gerson’s earlier reporting established that she had alerted the regulator by late March. Appel’s first-person account established what happened at the April 29 Centurion launch. The Alberta Information and Privacy Commissioner announced a PIPA investigation on May 7 into Centurion’s alleged collection, use, disclosure, safeguards and breach notification obligations.

Two separate datasets must remain separate in our analysis: White’s approximately 2,000 records visible through the 10X Votes skcn app, and the roughly 2.9 million electors in the disputed Centurion list. The known record does not establish that one was copied from the other or that the Centurion production database ran on the same Azure subscription. Combining them into a single U.S. database would overstate the evidence.

A separate post-injunction digital trace

Prime Rogue also found a Wix event-registration record associated with a 7 p.m. April 30 Centurion organizing session. Its archived signed token encodes a successful reservation status and an issuance time of 6:06:32 p.m. MDT; the Internet Archive captured the associated ticket-form URL at 6:06:45 p.m. MDT. The general event series was archived by March 19, while the April 30 session page was archived that morning. These are evidence of a Wix registration workflow, not evidence that the event was first created after the injunction or that the prohibited voter database was accessed after the order.

In plain English:

Centurion’s registration website recorded activity that evening. Its voter-list app had been restrained by the court. The Wix timestamp alone does not show anyone disobeyed the injunction.

What investigators and officials have said—and not said

In an October 23 on-record reply to Prime Rogue, Alberta RCMP media relations manager Fraser Logan confirmed that the investigation continued and that no charges had been laid as of that date. He declined to discuss investigative avenues, including geographic locations. A later Prime Rogue message asking for an appropriate channel to submit technical material and the Wix finding had not received a substantive reply at the reporting cutoff; it would be inaccurate to infer that investigators had or had not examined either issue.

Elaine Schiman, communications manager for Alberta’s privacy commissioner, likewise confirmed in correspondence to Prime Rogue that the May 7 investigation was ongoing, without a projected completion date or details of whether its scope had expanded. Elections Alberta said it was legally restricted in commenting on investigations without adverse findings. Prime Rogue also requested comment from Centurion organizer David Parker, Republican Party representative Cam Davies and Microsoft concerning the technical or data-handling questions; no substantive response was received by the October 26 deadline. These statements describe the status of Prime Rogue’s inquiries, not official conclusions about the Azure account.

A separate source question concerns foreign influence transparency. Alex Boutilier of Global News reported that Canada’s Foreign Influence Commissioner was aware of concerns and had contacted potential participants about transparency obligations before the referendum. Whether any particular U.S.–Alberta relationship met the registration test is not resolved here. Part 3 of this series examines those legal thresholds directly.

In plain English:

Regulators are investigating aspects of the voter-list controversy. None has publicly confirmed U.S. government control of the 10X Votes application or found that the two datasets share a source. Silence or a legal limit on comment is not evidence of complicity.

How Albertans actually voted

The result itself is no mystery. In official results published October 29, Elections Alberta reported 1,556,316 votes (74.95%) for remaining a province of Canada and 520,233 (25.05%) for beginning the constitutional process toward a later binding separation referendum. This October 19 question was non-binding and not a direct yes/no vote on independence.

A decisive electoral outcome does not erase legitimate questions about campaign financing, data stewardship, foreign government contacts or political transparency. Equally, the existence of those questions cannot be used to claim that American participants changed the result. No causal analysis supporting such an effect is presented here.

In plain English:

Albertans voted overwhelmingly to remain in Canada. The investigation concerns what happened around the campaign, not a claim that Americans determined the result.

Is this foreign election interference? Our evidence assessment

The label must be tested, not assumed. Public Safety Canada distinguishes normal foreign influence—diplomacy, open advocacy, political dialogue—from state-linked covert, deceptive or coercive interference. Other prohibitions on electoral data, referendum advertising or campaign finance may apply on their own terms, even when a national-security definition is not satisfied.

For clarity, Prime Rogue uses Admiralty-style provisional evidence codes below. They assess the reliability of the source and credibility of each proposition, not whether anyone broke the law. Here A means a highly reliable primary institutional record, B a generally reliable source evaluated alongside corroboration; 1 indicates confirmed by direct evidence and 2 means probably true on the corroborated record. These are newsroom analytical assessments, not government classifications.

Proposition	Assessment	What it does not prove
U.S. State Department personnel met Alberta separatist representatives	B2 — multiple contemporary reports plus department acknowledgment	Sponsorship, funding or direction
Michigan political technology representatives pitched 10X Votes in Calgary	B2 — Globe interviews and corroborating network reporting	Transfer of APP membership data or U.S. government involvement
skcn resolved to Microsoft Azure East US in Virginia on Oct. 22	A1 — retained DNS record and Azure naming	Database residency, historical upload path or account owner
Centurion’s Wix system generated a reservation-related trace the evening of the injunction	B2 — archived URL and signed-token fields	Post-order use of the prohibited electoral list
Alberta voters chose to remain in Canada, 74.95% to 25.05%	A1 — Elections Alberta official count	Which actors influenced an individual vote
Washington directed an illegal Alberta election operation	Not graded: insufficient evidence	No finding of that operation is made

In plain English:

We can report documented American political involvement, and Prime Rogue can independently report the Virginia-hosted application environment. The leap from those facts to illegal foreign election interference requires evidence and legal tests that neither an infographic nor a provocative headline can replace.

The unanswered questions—and the next installment

The most productive investigative questions are specific. Who held the Azure subscription? Who supplied the records on `skcn`? Was there any transfer between Centurion’s much larger elector dataset and the smaller 10X app? Who paid for the Alberta software deployment? Separately: Were there any U.S. government instructions or commitments beyond the State Department meetings and publicly reported remarks? Microsoft account records, contracts, invoices, communications and the entered court order could distinguish speculation from fact.

Part 1, Keep Your Nose Out, examines the Embassy’s claims and Canada’s diplomatic restrictions; the related Full Spectrum 1.1 investigation provides additional documentary context. The broader Full Spectrum 1 political investigation continues to cover official contacts. Full Spectrum 02 remains the technical dossier; Full Spectrum 3 will map the human networks behind that infrastructure as evidence permits. In Foreign Interference: Terms and Conditions Apply, Part 3 — “How About Them Apples?” will compare what Canadian and U.S. law actually prohibit.

There is enough evidence to ask the question. There is not enough to pretend we have already adjudicated the answer.

Foreign Interference. Terms and Conditions Apply.

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Source, correction and accountability note

• Original reporting credited: Luke LeBrun (PressProgress); Carrie Tait, Grant Robertson and Nathan VanderKlippe (The Globe and Mail); the Financial Times reporting team; Rory White (Canada’s National Observer); Jeremy Appel (The Orchard); Jen Gerson (The Line); Sean Boynton, Jack Farrell, Mackenzie Gray and Alex Boutilier (Global News).
• Prime Rogue original work: October 22–23 public-record infrastructure analysis and the archived Wix event-registration trace. The GitHub repository publishes the underlying DNS, certificate and Wayback evidence. No private elector records were accessed during that passive research.
• Correction history: The June 1 technical interpretation was superseded by the corrected forensic analysis; Cloudflare/Vercel attribution, the Saskatchewan hypothesis and commercial-certificate claims are withdrawn. This series relies on the October corrected analysis, not on the earlier claims. A corrected app-host location does not resolve the underlying database location.
• Official right of reply: Relevant prior statements and denials are included. October 23 requests and responses are handled in accordance with their attribution status.
• Legal and causal limits: No individual is accused of a crime here; a court injunction and open investigation are not equivalent to a conviction. No U.S. government role in operating skcn, and no vote-changing effect, is established by the evidence presented.