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How Did an Alberta Separatist Group Get Its Hands on the Voter List?

The data breach, likely the largest in Canadian history, raises urgent questions about election security

You can think of democracy in many ways. It is a word that stands in for a set of interconnected, abstract concepts—like freedom, equality, the right to vote in fair elections, government for the people, not the few.

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But boiled down, democracy, or a democracy, is a list. The list of electors comprises the full, legal names of people who have the right to vote in an election, their addresses, unique voter identification numbers, and the polling stations they can be expected to show up at in each riding on election day.

The list of electors is sacrosanct because it constitutes the political unit that elects a democratic government. It cannot be stated more forcefully than that, but it bears repeating for emphasis. The list of electors is a democracy in its raw essence.

Alberta’s democracy was stolen. It was sold for profit. And loaded up onto a far-right mobilization app by a pro-sovereignty group called the Centurion Project. Founded by David Parker—who also founded Take Back Alberta, the hardline conservative activist network that played a major role in Premier Danielle Smith’s rise to power—the Centurion Project has close ties to the MAGA movement in the United States. Parker and his partners didn’t believe the separatist petition process to a referendum was going to work using traditional methods: town halls, door knocking, phone banking, spending regulated amounts on advertising, communicating effectively—the grunt work of running a democratic campaign.

So instead, the Centurion Project licensed a voter ID tool that Parker gained familiarity with during his time with Tucker Carlson’s Live Tour. The tool helps volunteers leverage social networks toward what political parties call a “get out the vote” or GOTV strategy. One person identifies ten people in their network favourable to the separatist cause and is responsible for getting them to the polls on referendum day. Parker argued at his Centurion Project’s opening at the Edmonton Oilfield Technical Society on April 29 that the app was instrumental in delivering Michigan to Trump in 2024 when he flipped the swing state and defeated Kamala Harris by 1.42 percent.

The main issue is that the Centurion Project is not a registered political party and therefore has no right to access the list of electors, as they did on the black market for $45,000 (or so Parker has claimed). The copy they got their hands on was unsurprisingly that of the separatist Republican Party of Alberta. This was confirmed by Elections Alberta after analysis of the list that was loaded on the Centurion Project’s app determined that the salted names used as a security measure to prevent exactly this sort of behaviour matched the 2025 copy that was........

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