In This Untold Story Of Poll Worker Data, Chinese Servers, And Scandal, Only The FBI Knows The Truth

Developments over the last month in two cases, one criminal and one civil, involving the election-management software company Konnech and its CEO Eugene Yu, reveal the FBI remains mired in malfeasance.

Either the FBI has abandoned multiple confidential human sources and discarded an 18-month investigation into evidence that Yu maintained the personal information of tens of thousands of American election workers on a server in China, or the bureau has allowed Yu to be arrested for crimes he did not commit and permitted the innocent American to be branded a felon and traitor.

While at this point the public cannot tell which scenario is true, the Department of Justice and the FBI know, and their failure either to charge Yu (or provide the L.A. district attorney’s office with confirmation of the alleged crimes) or to clear him represents another blot on the disgraced agency’s name.

Here’s what you need to know to understand the brewing scandal. 

Konnech Provides Election Logistics Software

Konnech is a Michigan corporation founded by Yu, a Chinese national but an American citizen. According to court filings, “Konnech provides governmental entities in the U.S. with an election logistics software product called PollChief which those governmental entities use to recruit, train and schedule poll workers; coordinate the distribution of equipment and supplies to polling places; and dispatch support personnel to address technical and other issues.” The PollChief system “requires that workers submit personal identifying information, which is retained by the Konnech.” 

Because Konnech obtains sensitive personal information for election workers, it is bound by contract to safeguard that data including — in some contracts, such as one entered with Los Angeles County — by storing the data physically in the United States and not providing individuals outside the country access to that data.

True the Vote Investigates Konnech

True the Vote is a nonprofit headquartered in Texas that describes itself as “the nation’s leading voters’ rights and election integrity organization.” Catherine Engelbrecht founded True the Vote, and Gregg Phillips, a former board member, works closely with her.

According to Engelbrecht, after 2020 she became “interested in the fundamental underpinnings” of the “nuts and bolts” of staging and deploying an election cycle. So, True the Vote began to file open records requests with counties and discovered that Konnech provided the PollChief software to scores of municipalities via contracts that required safeguarding of the election workers’ data. 

True the Vote Claims Konnech Data Maintained on Chinese Server

Engelbrecht claims she asked Phillips “to take a deeper dive doing some basic tests … around the very basic security of the software itself and how it was managing the highly private and secure or sensitive data that it was responsible for.” Phillips claims True the Vote used some open-source tools, specifically one called Binary Edge, and soon realized that one particular IP address related to all of the software.

Phillips further claims that all the information on the PollChief software is rolled into a webpage. For instance, for Fairfax County,

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