Guess who is quietly lining up to fight British Columbia's upcoming referendum on electoral reform?

An astroturf group headed by Nick Kouvalis, who previously managed Kellie Leitch’s controversial Conservative leadership campaign, says it’s working to sway the outcome of British Columbia’s upcoming electoral reform vote.

In a recent e-mail blast, the group Keep Voting Simple tells its supporters BC’s upcoming electoral reform referendum is an “obvious attempt to confuse and manipulate voters” as part of a scheme to “transform BC’s electoral system”

The e-mail ends with an appeal for donations to “help us keep voting simple in BC,” something that is accompanied by a PO Box address in Markham, Ontario.

Kouvalis is a backroom political operative notorious for helping elect Rob Ford Mayor of Toronto and running the Conservative leadership campaign of Kellie Leitch earlier this year – considered one of the most controversial in recent Canadian history for its xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Kouvalis stepped away from Leitch’s leadership campaign in January after a profanity-laced Twitter tirade that saw him denounce a prominent constitutional scholar as a “cuck.”

Ironically, the 2017 Conservative leadership race made use of a ranked vote – but Keep Voting Simple now implies the same model is designed to “manipulate voters” and would be too complicated for BC voters to grasp.

The group made use of a similar argument when it opposed the federal Liberals’ (since abandoned) promise to change Canada’s electoral system, work the group showcased on Ezra Levant’s far-right Rebel Media website.

If BC opts to eliminate First-Past-the-Post, it will become the first province in Canada to do so – but some 80% of OECD countries already make use of proportional voting systems.