On Oct. 3, The New York Times ran with an article by reporter Stuart Thompson titled “How a Tiny Elections Company Became a Conspiracy Theory Target.”
In the article, Thompson claims that “election deniers” were targeting Konnech and dismissed as "conspiracy theories" reports that the company had ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to the personal data of around two million poll workers in the United States.
On Oct. 4, Konnech CEO Eugene Yu was arrested in Meridian Township in Michigan and held on suspicion of theft of personal identifying information which was stored on servers in communist China.
"I have never seen anything age this poorly, this quickly," Mollie Hemingway, editor in chief of The Federalist, tweeted.
Related: Made in China? A closer look at U.S. election software’s coders and patents, August 25, 2022
Computer hard drives and other “digital evidence” were seized by investigators in Michigan, authorities said.
Prosecutors will seek Yu's extradition to California.
In 2020, Konnech won a five-year, $2.9 million contract with Los Angeles County for software to track election worker schedules, training, payroll, and communications, according to the county registrar-recorder/county clerk, Dean Logan.
Konnech was required to keep the data in the United States and only provide access to citizens and permanent residents but instead stored it on servers in communist China, the LA District Attorney's Office said in an Oct. 4 press release.
The East Lansing-based Konnech Inc., which helps manage poll workers, poll locations, campaigns, assets, mail-in ballots, and supplies for elections in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, “has been recruiting Chinese software engineers since at least December 7, 2005,” the Kanekoa Newsletter on substack.com reported on Aug. 20.
WOW WOW WOWWWWWWWWWWWW.
I have never seen anything age this poorly, this quickly. By NYT's @stuartathompson Also, could adults stop using the Democrat propaganda term "election denial" to describe people with legitimate challenges to election administration? It's so puerile. pic.twitter.com/YEcevYjhdI — Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 5, 2022
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