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Election Integrity

Pakistan Big Data Firm Kavtech Received Nevada’s Voter Rolls

The non-profit voter integrity organization True the Vote, alerted state and federal authorities after it received an email back from the Nevada secretary of state’s website with an employee of Pakistani company Kavtech carbon copied.

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FBI Investigating Diverted Voter Rolls

Eligible Voters data dump confirmation email for download from the Secretary of State of Nevada.

On November 29, 2020, a user with the email Roberta@TrueTheVote.org requested a download of the voter rolls from the Secretary of State’s website. At first I thought Roberta was a hacked email used to download the data, but True the Vote has confirmed they requested the link. My attempts to identify who is “Roberta” have come up blank.

[FACT CHECK: The statewide voter registration database is publicly accessible through the Secretary of Stat’s office and available in either hard copy or by a variety of electronic formats, including online. The system is automated, thus all claims that the Secretary of State, herself, sent the entire voter file to Pakistan are intentionally misleading.]

I was able to directly confirm with the Election Division of the Secretary of State’s office that the incident did happen, and that there is an Active FBI investigation. No details as of yet if the file was downloaded abroad.

Whether there is a nefarious reason for the data being sent to Kavtech is the bigger question. The company is a major player in big data. When I downloaded the raw data dump file after the election I had issues porting it into a platform that is capable of opening it, let alone analyzing it. There are simply too many records for all but enterprise grade data companies to handle.

According to the company website, “Kavtech specialize is in Data Management with state of the art solutions for data integration, data visualization, data warehousing, data administration, data cleansing and business Intelligence our experts can convert your data into valuable asset for your company.”

This expertise could be helpful to anyone wanting to audit the voter rolls, cross-check other state voter registrations, or any number of additional data analyses… but True the Vote alerted the authorities that the cc was unauthorized…

Catherine Engelbrecht, ‘True the Vote’ President, released a letter on her website to John C. Demers, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, “Pursuant to making our request to the Nevada Secretary of State, the state’s website provided the information through a downloadable voter file via email. When it arrived, I was shocked to see the inclusion of another email address in the CC line.”

The unsubstantiated claim that Kavtech has ties to Pakistani intelligence seems to have started from this same letter in which Engelbrecht states, “The address was waqas@kavtech.net. Waqas Butt is the CEO of Kavtech Solutions Ltd.. Kavtech is a Pakistani owned company, located in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan, with ties to Pakistani intelligence, military, and the interior.”

“The fact that this company was cc’ed on an email containing access to the Nevada voter registration database appears to be evidence of a breach within the Nevada Secretary of State’s email system,” Engelbrecht told Demers.

“Obviously, the problems that such a breach may evidence include access to at least the voter registration information of Nevada residents. At worst it could reveal a breach that gives a foreign power access to not only the State of Nevada’s systems, but also to the email systems of anyone whom the State communicates with via email,” she added.

As well as attaching the voter file email to the Demers letter, they mysterious Roberta appears to also have forwarded it to gregg@opsec.group – Gregg Phillips, of Opsec Group, LLC, which was only formed September 17, 2020, but many will remember him as the former head of the Mississippi Department of Human Services and the author of a tweet, cited by U.S. President Donald Trump, which claims that between three and five million non-citizens voted in the 2016 elections for Hillary Clinton. This claim went viral despite Phillips never releasing the analysis of the data obtained from State election divisions and collected through the app VoteStand, a partnership between Phillips company and True the Vote, which is advertised to be the “first online election fraud reporting app” available to voters across the country “to quickly report suspected election illegalities as they happen.” The original purpose of the partnership was to update and analyze voter registration data in the U.S. to supposedly identify indicators of each person voting such as citizenship or non-citizenship, identity, and felony status.

We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens.

We are joining .@TrueTheVote to initiate legal action. #unrigged

— Gregg Phillips (@JumpVote) November 13, 2016

Original tweet from now defunct @jumpvote twitter account run by gregg phillips

In my twenties I worked at Fair, Isaac, pumping millions of consumer credit files through the scorecards built by the brilliant PhDs in the division I worked for to ensure they performed as specified. I’m not new to big data, how to work with it or more than that, how to manipulate it to get the results you want.

I’ve personally analyzed the 2016 data and the statistical irregularities in Los Angeles and New York, and the two counties which totaled the entirety of Clinton’s claimed popular vote win are deeply suspect. Phillips could have a point.

During an interview with Breitbart News, Engelbrecht asked, “Why would they [Pakistani company] be getting this information? Why would they show up on a cc line? There’s no good way to look at that should make anyone feel confident in the security of this process.”

Indeed, the majority of voters in this country do not feel confident. For good reason.

When I downloaded the voter rolls the first thing I noticed is that there are more than ten million records. The National Voter Registration Act requires that State’s clean their voter roles every two years and not less than 90 days prior to any federal election.

The data dump of voter files included 10,473,092 voter files

According to the Secretary of State’s official election statistics, there are 2,062,466 registered voters, of which, 1,865,551 are considered “active voters” who voted in the 2020 Presidential Election. The data does not easily lend it self to negative tests, as in, are not “registered.” But with more than eight million extraneous voters on the rolls, one has to wonder what could be done…

And while the system allows users to add additional email addresses where the link to the completed report can be downloaded, it is unclear whether the user logged in as roberta@truethevote.org added the address, or if a hacker added the cc to all emails to that address, and if so on whose mail servers? Only the FBI has the headers from the email to see where the cc was inserted, and it may very well be true that the Secretary of State’s website was hacked. But another possibility is that since True the Vote has already publically stated they are acquiring all of the voter rolls, so a savvy hacker might believe it’s easier to hack the non-governmental server. Calls to True the Vote were not returned as of publication.

Wherever the hack originated, and the FBI should be able to easily trace it, what is concerning is that personally identifiable information is included in the voter rolls. Combined with the millions of data points already commercially available, it would not be difficult to create detailed personas of eligible voters who are “inactive” and take over those accounts. Scary, but not difficult.

Database fields revealed in the Nevada Voter Rolls

From its web presence, Kavtech appears to be primarily a mobile app developer, having launched apps like, “What’s My Age,” and “How Do I Look” in the Google Play store along with several others. And while several sites have shared a diagram of the connections to Pakistani ISI and indeed one of their employees posted a tweet with the hashtag #YesIamISI, the “evidence” feels like a stretch.

But their tech stack capabilities do appear that they are capable of much more than a simple game. I could find no clear nefarious ties to ISI for Kavtech’s CEO Waqas Butt, who has an apparently clear work history, references, and demonstrated technical abilities… but, if I were a spook looking to navigate millions, or hundreds of millions of voter records and analyze opportunities, Kavtech the tech stack I’d be looking for…

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