NYT Pretends To Debunk Poll Worker ‘Conspiracy.’ One Day Later, The ‘Election Deniers’ Were Vindicated

Once referred to as America’s “newspaper of record,” the regime-approved New York Times is back with its latest “pie in the face” moment, and boy is it a doozy.

On Monday, the left-wing outlet published a lengthy piece admonishing a group of “election deniers” and “conspiracy theorists” for expressing concerns last month that Konnech, a relatively small U.S. software company that handles poll worker data, “had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers in the United States.”

“In the ensuing weeks, the conspiracy theory grew as it shot around the internet,” wrote Times reporter Stuart Thompson. “To believers, the claims showed how China had gained near complete control of America’s elections.”

The notion of Konnech’s potential election security risks was first raised by an organization called True the Vote, whose members claimed at an August conference in Phoenix that “they investigated Konnech in early 2021” and “gained access to Konnech’s database by guessing the password,” resulting in their team purportedly downloading “personal information on about 1.8 million poll workers.”

Rather than attempt to verify the claims by doing actual investigative journalism, Thompson let his clear-as-day political biases drive his work and simply parroted Konnech, which asserted that “none of the accusations were true” and that “all the data for its American customers were stored on servers in the United States and that it had no ties to the Chinese government.”

Thompson even attempted to garner sympathy for the company’s “founder and chief executive, Eugene Yu, an American citizen who immigrated from China in 1986,” and who had gone “into hiding with his family after receiving threatening messages” over the accusations.

“I’ve cried,” Yu allegedly wrote in an email, according to the Times. “Other than the birth of my daughter, I hadn’t cried since kindergarten.”

Konnech’s denial was apparently enough for Thompson, who proceeded to spend several paragraphs attacking “conspiracy theorists” and “far-right election deniers” who “have subjected election officials and private companies that play a major role in elections to a barrage of outlandish voter fraud claims.”

“[T]he attacks on Konnech demonstrate how far-right election deniers are also giving more attention to new and more secondary companies and groups,” Thompson wrote. “Their claims often find a receptive online audience, which then uses the assertions to raise doubts about the integrity of American elections.”

There’s one key problem with Thompson’s story, though: The accusations against Konnech appear to be true.

On Tuesday, just one day after writing his hit piece on “election deniers,” Thompson was forced to report that Yu “was arrested by Los Angeles County officials in connection with an investigation into the possible theft of personal information about poll workers” and that the office of Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón “had found [poll worker] data stored in China.”

“The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said in an emailed statement that it had cause to believe that personal information on election workers was ‘criminally mishandled,’” Thompson wrote on Tuesday.

Thompson and the New York Times’ quick dismissal of the Konnech concerns is a perfect display of how the country’s elitist, leftist media are nothing more than propaganda machines for the Democrat Party. Despite there being legitimate problems with America’s elections, such as the infiltration of private money into local election offices to get out Democrat voters, the corporate press would rather stick their collective head in the sand, repeat their grotesque “election denier” smear, and call it a day.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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