Detroit Clerk Janice Winfrey says her office has decided to stop using a Michigan-based election software vendor that’s facing a high-profile data breach allegation involving poll worker information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Tuesday, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gasc\u00f3n announced the arrest<\/a> of Eugene Yu, founder and CEO of Okemos-based Konnech Corporation. According to court documents, Yu faced a warrant out of California for “embezzlement of public funds.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The DeKalb County elections board has chosen not to end its relationship with Konnech, a software company whose founder was recently arrested on accusations he stole the personal data of California poll workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the contract will be amended \u2014 and, moving forward, the county will house any personal information collected from local poll workers on the servers it controls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chairwoman Dele Lowman Smith said the decision would allow DeKalb to ensure data was stored securely while continuing efforts to \u201cimprove our service to poll workers and improve our efficiency.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The vote, split 3-2 along party lines, was contentious,” Tyler Estep wrote<\/a> for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution adding: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat gives me a lot of heartburn,\u201d said Jester, a former county commissioner and the board\u2019s vice chair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The leader of the DeKalb GOP, at least two local poll workers and Stephen Binney, a regular observer of DeKalb County politics, also spoke against continuing the contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think you need to wash your hands,\u201d Binney said, \u201cand get out of this situation as quickly as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n DeKalb finalized its licensing agreement for Konnech\u2019s PollChief software only last month, signing a one-year, $76,000 contract. The software helps elections staff manage scheduling and training for poll workers and is not connected to any voting equipment, nor does it have access to voter information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last week, Konnech founder and president Eugene Yu was detained near his firm\u2019s Michigan headquarters. Authorities there were acting on behalf of Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gasc\u00f3n.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The California prosecutor later said that, under its contract with LA County, Konnech was \u201csupposed to securely maintain\u201d personal information of local poll workers and ensure that \u201conly United States citizens and permanent residents have access to it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Investigators allegedly found that some information was instead being stored on servers in the People\u2019s Republic of China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Few other details have been released.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Yu\u2019s arrest \u2014 which Konnech has decried, describing it as a \u201cwrongful detention\u201d \u2014 came after months of targeting by election deniers and conspiracy theorists like the group known as True the Vote. That group has suggested that Yu, who was born in China, has secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It has also claimed to have hacked Konnech\u2019s systems and accessed the data of 2 million poll workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Konnech\u2019s website previously boasted of having two dozen clients in North America but, according to media reports, that figure has dwindled since Yu\u2019s arrest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The city of Detroit<\/a> and Fairfax County, Virginia, have cancelled their contracts with Konnech. Officials with the city of Minneapolis released a statement Friday<\/a> saying they were \u201clooking into the impact, if any,\u201d on poll workers there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n DeKalb officials have said they were in the early stages of implementing the PollChief software and only publicly available information like the names, phone numbers and addresses of poll workers had been entered into the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lowman Smith, the elections board chair, said the decision to move any such information to county-managed servers \u201cwould eliminate the concern of the data being placed somewhere where we are not in control.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere was not a [management] system in the past, there was not a system to default to,\u201d Lowman Smith said. \u201cIt was manual and extremely time consuming. And it was not timely.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Democratic board member Susan Motter said she voted to continue on with the software because \u201callegations are just that.\u201d Motter, whose mother was a naturalized American citizen from Japan, also grew emotional as she talked about the whiff of anti-Asian sentiment surrounding Konnech and its founder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She said someone recently told her to \u201cgo back where you come from\u201d while she was running an errand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI have been seriously concerned with the subtext that has come with all of the discussion around this contract,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Early voting for November\u2019s mid-term elections begins Oct. 17. DeKalb will employ between 1,700 and 1,800 poll workers during the election, officials said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Detroit Clerk Janice Winfrey says her office has decided to stop using a Michigan-based election software vendor that’s facing a high-profile data breach allegation involving poll worker information. On Tuesday, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gasc\u00f3n announced the arrest of Eugene Yu, founder and CEO of Okemos-based Konnech Corporation. According to court documents, Yu faced a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5343,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-stories"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/konnech-election-data-yu.jpg?fit=630%2C330&ssl=1",630,330,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/konnech-election-data-yu.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/konnech-election-data-yu.jpg?fit=300%2C157&ssl=1",300,157,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/konnech-election-data-yu.jpg?fit=630%2C330&ssl=1",630,330,true],"large":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/konnech-election-data-yu.jpg?fit=630%2C330&ssl=1",630,330,true],"rpg_gallery_admin_thumb":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/konnech-election-data-yu.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1",150,150,true],"rpg_gallery_thumb":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/konnech-election-data-yu.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1",150,150,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/konnech-election-data-yu.jpg?fit=630%2C330&ssl=1",630,330,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/konnech-election-data-yu.jpg?fit=630%2C330&ssl=1",630,330,true]},"author_info":{"info":["Peter Santilli"]},"category_info":"Featured Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Featured Stories","comment_count":"0","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/konnech-election-data-yu.jpg?fit=630%2C330&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/plD2r-1oa","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5344,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5342\/revisions\/5344"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}