Over ten days ago, the CEO of election software company Konnech, Eugene Yu, was arrested on account of suspicion that he and his associates were involved in identity theft of Los Angeles County election workers.
The information was supposedly stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China, with the most shocking part of the story actually being the arrest was ordered by District Attorney George Gascon, who’s infamous for being soft on criminals.
Personal information from LA, several other swing counties stored on servers in PRC
One of the company’s pieces of software is a program called PollChief, made for scheduling supply and logistics procedures for all the election workers involved.
Even though Konnech was supposed to abide by state and federal law regarding information security, they failed to adhere to it.
The alleged actions of Konnech storing data from our elections on servers in China, not only made our elections vulnerable to fraud, but is a threat to our national security. Michiganders shouldn’t accept @JocelynBenson being silence about the arrest of the of CEO of Konnech!
— Kristina Karamo (@KristinaKaramo) October 13, 2022
Yu tried to pull out of the chaos that was unfolding by claiming all of his company’s customer data is stored safely on servers within the US. However, further investigation proved there are dozens of reasons to be concerned about the security of our election info.
It was found that Konnech was using third-party contractors from China to create and adapt their PollChief software through a plethora of personal ID dumps from Konnech employees.
This means the personal information was purposely sent to none other than China. Seeing how several third-party contractors were involved, this puts Konnech in full violation of the state’s anti-independent contracting law.
Eugene Yu told Judge Kenneth Hoyt that Konnech does not store any American poll worker data in China.
The Los Angeles District Attorney's office says their investigators found internal Konnech communications admitting that the company stored American poll worker data in China.
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGr8) October 14, 2022
Massive data breach
Even if there was no malicious intent behind this move by Konnech, the fact still remains there was a possibility of it happening, validating almost every concern the general public has regarding security of US elections for quite a while now.
While we can’t tell whether incidents like this happened in the past, we can certainly confirm Konnech was involved in this security breach through August this year, at the very least.
Many have pointed out that PollChief has several glaring issues, which are only made worse by this information leak. Full knowledge of the locations of ballot boxes is a ticking time-bomb when it comes to ballot harvesting and delivery.
The Democrats on the DeKalb Board of Elections just voted to keep Konnech, an election management system that has had its’ CEO arrested for data theft and who has violated the trust of its' customers and their poll workers. Let that sink in as elections have consequences.
— Marci McCarthy (@MarciMcCarthyUS) October 10, 2022
Thankfully, a growing number of jurisdictions within the state have terminated their contract with Konnech in light of these developments; although a data breach of this scale shouldn’t be dealt with individually by each jurisdiction.
Seeing the massive amounts of potential for abuse in PollTech software should be enough to have it purged from the US entirely; it could backfire at the worst time possible, including the upcoming midterm elections.
It remains unclear why federal agencies haven’t been involved in this investigation, as Konnech’s software is used around the country, not just in LA County.
