While Donald Trump’s announcement on Tuesday to enter a third bid for the U.S. presidency couldn’t rival 2015’s grand and iconic descent down the golden escalator, it may turn out to be as equally historic and impactful.
“I will immediately demand voter ID, same-day voting, and only paper ballots,” he declared in a tempered speech from his home at Mar-a-Lago, adding, “and, and we want all votes counted by Election Night!” The former president touted a host of promises to the American people that night, including to “Make America Great and Glorious Again” and to eliminate cheating in elections.
The vow to commit to election-integrity issues comes at a time when large swathes of the GOP electorate are still uncertain about what really happened in the 2020 presidential election. Not surprisingly, questions are rampant about the results of the 2022 midterms. In key swing states with extremely tight races (think Nevada and Arizona), voting machines suddenly stopped working, disenfranchising thousands of voters. Security cameras at polling centers went dark in the middle of the night, and ballots were still being counted two weeks after election day.
Voters deserve better, and the forward momentum of the grassroots election-integrity movement will gain more traction with the support of strong leaders such as Trump.
“Largest Data Breach in United States History,” but Nothing to See Here
However, some courageous fighters in the ongoing battle for free and fair elections have paid a price for their efforts. Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the Houston-based nonpartisan election-integrity group True the Vote, along with longtime True the Vote contractor Gregg Phillips, are engaged in a contentious legal battle over their challenging of the “body politic” and the assumption that the government is doing all it can to secure U.S. elections.
The increasingly convoluted story began when Phillips, who has been in the election-integrity and intelligence community for 40 years, tipped off authorities to the potential illegal storing of personal information of American poll workers on Chinese servers by a man named Eugene Yu, CEO of Michigan-based election-software firm Konnech, which contracts its PollChief election-management software out to various cities and counties across the country.
On October 4, Yu was arrested in Michigan and charged by Los Angeles County investigators with theft of personal identifying information of poll workers in Los Angeles. Yu was also found in violation of Konnech’s $2.9 million contract with Los Angeles County. “District Attorney investigators found that in contradiction to the contract [with Konnech], information was stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China,” read a statement from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
Per the state prosecutor’s complaint: “Based on evidence recovered from a search warrant executed October 4, 2022, the District Attorney’s Office discovered that Konnech employees known and unknown sent personal identifying information of Los Angeles County election workers to third-party software developers who assisted with creating and fixing Konnech’s internal ‘PollChief’ software.”
Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Eric Neff alleged in court that the amount of data involved in the breach was “astounding,” adding that “this is probably the largest data breach in United States history,” according to the The Epoch Times.
In September, in response to allegations by True the Vote, lawyers for Konnech and Yu filed a civil hacking and defamation lawsuit against Engelbrecht and Phillips, arguing that True the Vote hacked Konnech’s computer data and defamed the company with a “xenophobic smear campaign.”
Despite Yu being arrested on the exact charges Phillips alleged — the illegal storing of American election-worker data on Chinese servers — a Texas judge is determined to move forward with the case and to penalize Engelbrecht and Phillips harshly if they refuse his orders.
Judge Issues Contempt Charges
On October 29, Judge Kenneth Hoyt, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, found Engelbrecht and Phillips in contempt of court for refusing to disclose the identity of a “confidential FBI informant” who provided the pair with data supporting claims of possible theft of poll workers information now on servers in China.
Journalist Emerald Robinson reported on her Substack page that Judge Hoyt further granted Konnech’s request for a temporary restraining order against Engelbrecht and Phillips, prohibiting them from “accessing, or attempting to access, Konnech’s computers or disclosing any of the company’s data.”
On October 31, Engelbrecht and Phillips were jailed without bail for nearly a week for refusing to name their source. They were released on November 7 after appealing all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which found the contempt charge in error.
Upon her release from jail, Engelbrecht wrote in a letter to her supporters that she and Phillips have “wasted no time jumping into Election Day operations.” She also reflected on the disappointing midterm results:
Perhaps we did have a tsunami of sorts after all, though it did not look like we expected it to. The wave of passion-filled Americans, voting, serving, seeing firsthand the process failures that increasingly define our elections — it’s a wave of truth that’s washing over millions of Americans willing to stand in defense of their freedoms, regardless of what the “establishment” tries to spin.
The political establishment is not on board with correcting what has become a perpetually broken election process. They prefer the status quo. While not everyone is part of the engine that drives election fraud, they are on board with it because politicos know how to exploit the vulnerabilities to get them to their desired destinations. It’s going to take continued Atlassian efforts on our part to keep elections free and fair.
Engelbrecht’s determination to expose the truth has raised the stakes in a lawsuit wending its way through the federal courts, though many conservatives claim Houston-based Judge Hoyt is covering up the crimes of Yu and protecting Konnech from any significant scrutiny.
In her reporting, Robinson points to several backstories connected to the case, including an argument for how the FBI tried to conceal Chinese infiltration of our elections as well as this follow-up story by Kanekoa, followed by this story, also by Kanekoa and published on Substack.
“Bias in the Presentation”; L.A.’s Far-left DA Drops All Charges
On November 9, two days after Engelbrecht and Phillips were released from jail, charges against Yu were dropped by a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge who granted a motion by Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón’s office to dismiss the case.
“We are concerned about both the pace of the investigation and the potential bias in the presentation and investigation of the evidence,” Gascón spokesperson Tiffiny Blacknell said in a statement per National Public Radio. It is not clear if the county will refile charges after further review of the case, as it would first need to “assemble a new team, with significant cyber security experience to determine whether any criminal activity occurred.”
The decision to dismiss the charges might be chalked up to the fact that conservatives exposed Yu, and the timing is curious, coming on the heels of Judge Hoyt’s decision to jail Engelbrecht and Phillips for not following the terms of the court.
Yet Phillips and Engelbrecht are now more determined than ever to continue to uncover and fight election fraud. Their research provided the basis for the highly acclaimed film 2,000 Mules by author, filmmaker, and podcast host Dinesh D’Souza.
In an October 30 post on the social-media outlet Truth Social, Phillips wrote:
When the story of Konnech, the FBI, Catherine and I is finally told, I guarantee you will be shocked.
In June, I said 10x bigger than mules, I was wrong. 1,000X.
As Catherine says, “what you know about Konnech is a snowflake in a glacier.”
It’s a story of cowardice, espionage, and treason.
The person we are protecting is self-important. He is inconsequential to the story.
He has no risk. He is afraid. We are going to jail because he is a coward siding with the FBI.
Konnech and Yu have vehemently denied the accusations against them, but Yu’s arrest and news of the alleged crimes ahead of the midterms raised red flags for voting offices around the country, prompting several jurisdictions, including Virginia’s Fairfax County and the city of Detroit, to stop using the firm’s software altogether “out of an abundance of caution.”
Follow the Data
Engelbrecht, who started True the Vote in 2010, has long sounded the alarm on the vulnerabilities of the U.S. election system. She and Phillips began digging into the evidence of voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election, alleging that True the Vote has the largest store of data for the 2020 presidential election than anyone else in the world.
“No one has more data than we do,” she remarked in D’Souza’s film. Given the anomalies that were introduced in such a major way in 2020, including the privately funded mail-in drop boxes and the mass mailings of ballots, Engelbrecht believes “some bad actors” were delivering ballots to drop boxes illegally, and that there has to be a way to catch and prosecute them.
Using a technique known as geotracking, a common tool for law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and marketing companies that captures the signals emitted from a cellphone and records the coordinates of a person’s location and time, True the Vote tracked the data of individuals, or “mules,” who traveled between ballot drop boxes and nonprofit organizations numerous times a day during a two-week period in key swing states, including Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
For example, from October 1 to January 6, in places such as Atlanta, 242 mules went on average to 24 drop boxes and eight organizations during a two-week period. From ballot collectors to ballot stash houses to the mules doing the drops, it is the biggest voter-fraud operation in the history of America. True the Vote claims mules earned up to $10 a ballot. Three dozen mules were also participating in violent Anitfa and BLM riots.
According to the group, there were over 200 mules in Phoenix. In Milwaukee, 100 mules traveled to 28 drop boxes. In Detroit, more than 500 mules were identified, visiting more than 100 drop boxes. In Philadelphia, over 1,100 mules were geotracked to roughly 50 drop boxes each.
Moreover, True the Vote obtained more than four million hours of surveillance footage of drop boxes around the country, including in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. The geospatial data supports the video, Engelbrecht and Phillips told D’Souza. In one Georgia county alone, 252 people approached a ballot box on a single day, but over 1,500 ballots were deposited.
Yet, as D’Souza points out, in no state is it legal for nonprofits to collect ballots and then pay mules to drop them off at various drop boxes. “It looks like they are subverting democracy under the public pretense of protecting it,” said D’Souza. Phillips agreed, stating that “on the other side of fear is freedom. If you never get past the fear, you are never free.”
Time to “claw back the deep institutional structures responsible for the erosion of our freedoms,” as Engelbrecht reminds us, before it’s too late and another election cycle is compromised.
