In August 2021, I wrote an article titled: Mike Lindell and China Hacking American Elections. This article is an update and in my opinion validates Lidnell’s claims.
Let me start off with the back story, Mike Lindell was hosting a symposium supposedly showing how the U.S. elections were hacked. I thoroughly went through the claims and tied everything back that I could. After researching Lindell’s claims, I came away with the conclusion:
- 95% confident hacks on voting systems occurred
- 60% confident the hacks materially changed one or more state election
- 10% confident they have the packet captures proving the election was hacked
I have little doubt voting machines can and are hacked regularly. The question is really, how often and is it material. Mike Lindell attempts to answer this question
Absolute Proof Recap
In Mike’s video Absolute Proof go to the timestamp 1:36:00
In the video, they show what appears to be doing network tracing to track who is accessing various election systems around the U.S. See a screenshot below.
Now, I have been vocal that I find those claims VERY dubious. Here are several claims that were made:
- They have monitored 2700+ counties (there are 3143 in the U.S.)
- Monitored in real-time, the access logs
- Know how the machines were accessed
- Have a “log trace” (what does that mean in this context?)
- Know which votes were manipulated and by how much
Simple question, who could have this information? The list is rather small,
- A cyber security firm could have this data
- A CDN (if the votes were cross referenced with the timestamps)
- A voting management software company
- An agency of the U.S. government
The final claim made in this section of the video is that ~2/3 of the access attempts on the election machines came from Chinese locations.
Perhaps, this is true. I didn’t buy it.
My opinion at the time was that unless there was additional evidence for why this would be the case and could explain how managed to obtain these access logs, it was probably bunk.
To my surprise, last week some potential evidence appeared! A widly used voting management software company appears to have been storing data on Chinese servers.
CEO of Konnech Election Systems Arrested
On October 4, 2022 there was an arrest of one Eugene Yu, CEO of Konnech Election Systems. According to the LA county district attorney, the arrest warrant was issued for the follow reason:
Konnech distributes and sells its proprietary PollChief software, which is an election worker management system that was utilized by the county in the last California election. The software assists with poll worker assignments, communications and payroll. PollChief requires that workers submit personal identifying information, which is retained by the Konnech.
Under its $2.9 million, five-year contract with the county, Konnech was supposed to securely maintain the data and that only United States citizens and permanent residents have access to it.
District Attorney investigators found that in contradiction to the contract, information was stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China.
In terms of personal details about Eugene Yu, according to Newsweek
Yu is an American citizen who immigrated from China in 1986.
Yu and Konnech—which has 21 employees in the U.S. and six in Australia—became the target of claims by a group of election deniers that the company had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had supplied information about 2 million poll workers.
…
The website quotes Yu saying that the “strong partnerships we have formed with election administrators over the years have helped us continuously improve our PollChief Election management system since 2006.
Interesting! The LA county district attorney has evidence enough for an arrest warrant issued by a judge (although, that’s not evidence of guilt — just suspicion). Further, Eugene Yu was a Chinese national who moved to the U.S. and helped develop election software, who appears to be knowingly breaking the law.
The software itself appears to be directly managing the systems used in election management as well as messages, schedules and potentially access.
Further, they are used by thousands of election offices and is entirely cloud based.
Notably, on an older version of their website (pollchief.com) only a few counties were listed. There is also discussion of licensing, which implies it could be used much more broadly. However, at this time it’s unclear how widely the software was used. It appears it would cover around 0.5-2% of the U.S. population.
Konnech‘s China Connections
I personally first became aware of this story during a live stream, which was discussing election management software vulnerabilities. There is a detailed article on substack discussing how they traced the network and discovered what was happening with the ChiefPoll software (particularly how it was sending data to Chinese IP addresses). Further how the developers / team at Konnech were highly connected with China and appeared to be hosting their equipment within China.
In addition to the original reporting, there were others who went digging. At least one person discovered Konnech was developed utilizing DoD funding [1].
One important aspect to all of this is after the live stream and substack article Konnech and Yu sued True The Vote for defamation on September 14, 2022. Effectively, Konnech contested the claims and argued that True The Vote needed to release their source who provided this information / evidence to True The Vote[pdf].
Mike Lindell and Konnech Election Systems
Tying this together…
It appears plausible that the system access and network logs in Mike Lindell’s video could be the same as True the Vote’s data, or the data from Konnech is a subset of the overall data. Konnech itself claims pollchief is used by thousands of election offices and in Mike Lindell’s video they claim to have data from thousands of counties (but notably not all counties) in the United States.
That said, I don’t necessarily have proof it’s the same source. Regardless, the evidence thus far provides a clear means by which China could have gained access to multiple voting system. Simply put, PollChief could used to manage the elections; this was from a 2019 snapshot of pollchief.com‘s product offering:
An admin who had access would change the electronic poll book, voter registration database, integration with 3rd party systems, ballot accounting, etc. While this may not validate the exact claims from the Absolute Proof movie. I felt it worth noting as it appears to strongly indicate it was possible Mike Lindell had accurate information.
My Opinion
My personal view, is that it is far more likely
- Election law was changed
- Mail-in ballots were sent to everyone on the voter registration database
- 3rd parties gained access to voter registration database(s) (these were authorized by the state)
- People / Organizations collected ballots and mailed them in (see film 2000 mules)
- Signatures on mail-in ballots were not validated
- The voter registration database was later manipulated to hide the fraud (here’s the proof – there was a different address in the voter registration file after the election… from mail in ballots)
This was largely admitted to in an article on Time – The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election and really by Joe Biden himself..
Joe Biden brags about having “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics”https://t.co/wjRKvYi4l2 pic.twitter.com/hC8j4Ijpr7
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 24, 2020
There was no chain of custody on ballots and in turn it is impossible to say one way or the other whether a given ballot was valid. As such, the election was not conducted in the legal manner.
With that in mind, it doesn’t preclude others gaining access to the system or companies doing illegal things. There are likely many true conspiracies going on when elections role around. It’s merely a matter of which elections were impacted and in what manner. In the case of Konnech Election Systems, that remains unclear. However, it’s interesting enough that it closely mirrors what Mike Lindell shared.