Robocalls linked to Tory IP address
ELECTIONS CANADA probe shows ‘Pierre Poutine’ calls to voters originated from same source as legitimate calls to supporters
OTTAWA – The IP address used to send misleading robocalls to Guelph, Ont., voters on election day was the same address used by a worker from the campaign office of local Conservative candidate Marty Burke, Elections Canada investigators believe.
The Internet Protocol address – like an Internet phone number – was used by campaign worker Andrew Prescott to arrange legitimate calls through Racknine, the Edmonton voice broadcasting firm.
But the same IP address was also used to arrange the fraudulent “Pierre Poutine” calls that pretended to be from Elections Canada and sent hundreds of electors to the wrong polling stations, Elections Canada alleges in court documents.
Racknine records provided to Elections Canada showed Prescott’s account had been accessed from a Rogers IP address in Guelph, 99.225.228.34.
The IP addresses used by Pierre Poutine to set up the calls were hidden by a proxy server that masks the originating IP. On one occasion, however, Poutine – or Pierre Jones, as he was known to Racknine – made contact from same address used to access Prescott’s account with the company.
There is no indication that Prescott himself logged on to Racknine as Poutine or Jones, only that the logon came from the same IP address affiliated with his account.
Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews filed the statement on March 20 to support a request for a court order compelling Rogers to turn over subscriber information about the account that used that IP address on that day.
Prescott, who has repeatedly denied having any involvement in the deceptive election day calls, downloaded a list of numbers from the Conservatives’ central database, on April 30, the same day that someone bought a disposable “burner” cellphone under the fake Poutine name, according to a statement filed by Mathews.
Mathews interviewed Prescott in February and they were scheduled to have an interview on March 8, but the day before, Prescott’s lawyer cancelled the meeting.
Mathews’s statement also recounts interviews with staff from Conservative party headquarters who told him that a key member of the Burke campaign had referred to the possibility of making misdirecting robocalls.
Matthew Mcbain, who worked in the party’s “war room,” said he spoke to Burke’s communication director, Michael Sona, in April after Guelph campaign volunteer John White vouched for him.
“Sona spoke to Mcbain about a campaign of disinformation such as making a misleading poll moving call,” Mathews wrote.
“Mcbain warned Sona off such conduct as the party would not stand for it.”
After the Ottawa Citizen and Postmedia News first revealed the robocalls investigation, Sona suddenly resigned his job on Parliament Hill with MP Eve Adams.
Mathews also interviewed Chris Crawford, a worker on the Guelph campaign who now serves a director of parliamentary affairs to Intergovernmental Affairs Minis- ter Peter Penashue.
Crawford told Mathews that, while in Burke’s campaign office, he had heard Sona speaking to campaign manager Ken Morgan about calling non-supporters late at night, pretending to be Liberals, or calling electors to tell them their polling stations had moved.
Other revelations from the documents released by the Ottawa court on Friday include:
The credit cards used to pay for the robocalls were prepaid, and purchased from two different Shoppers Drug Marts in Guelph. The person bought a Mastercard with $200 in credit and three Visa cards totalling $260.
For some of his contacts with Racknine, the Pierre Poutine suspect used a proxy server based in Saskatchewan in an attempt to mask his IP address. Mathews said in the statement that he intends to seek a court order in Saskatchewan to obtain the records from free proxyserver.ca.
Mathews says that Matt Meier, owner of Racknine, provided the list of numbers used in the fraudulent robocall to the Conservative party, who then compared it to the list of Constituent Information Management Systems (CIMS) data for Guelph. “They said the Racknine list appears to be a list of identified non-conservative supporters.”
The party was unable to obtain a copy of one of the lists Prescott downloaded from CIMS. Anonymous sources have told Postmedia and the Citizen that Elections Canada investigators have aggressively questioned witnesses about the missing list, which was provided to investigators by Chris Rougier, the party’s central voter contact manager, who played a key role co-ordinating telephone services during the campaign.