Long after even many of the stalwart election deniers have given up, Mike Lindell is still at it.
Following a visit to Alabama last week, the MyPillow CEO declared that 100,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election in the state had somehow been flipped.
“This was the one time we’re going to have to do a little bit of a deeper dive here,” Lindell said by way of explanation. “On the surface you can’t see where it happened. What I guarantee they’ve had to do in Alabama is the bad people … went deeper into the well. Very deep into the well of how they did the flips.”
Lindell, and this will stun you, offered no proof for such a massive allegation. And almost immediately, John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state in Alabama, flatly rejected Lindell’s claim.
“All our (voting) machines are custom-built,” Merrill told AL.com. “There’s no modem component. You can’t influence them through a cell phone or a landline. There’s no way they can be probed or numbers manipulated.”
Merrill, widely regarded as a rising star within the newly Trumpified Republican Party, was expected to run for Senate in 2022 but backed out at the last minute when word of an extramarital affair emerged. He announced he would not run for Senate or seek any other elected office next November.
In short: He has zero reason to lie or cover up any sort of election fraud. None.
Consider what Lindell is alleging here. In 2020 in Alabama, roughly 2.3 million votes were cast for Donald Trump (1,441,170) and Joe Biden (849,624). Lindell is claiming that 100,000 votes were flipped from Trump to Biden, meaning that, roughly 12% of all the votes cast for Biden were, in fact, actually cast for Trump and then (impossibly) flipped to the Democrat. More than 1 in every 10 votes Biden got!
Which is pretty widespread voter fraud. The sort of thing that, if it actually existed, would surely have caught the eye of the Republican secretary of state, right? Right!
Then there’s this: Trump won Alabama by almost half a million votes; he took 62% to Biden’s nearly 37%. Why, you might ask yourself, would election meddlers conduct an operation designed, according to Lindell, to flip votes from Trump to Biden in a state that was on no one’s competitive radar and where the incumbent president absolutely swamped the Democratic challenger?
None of it – and I mean NONE of it – makes any sense. What’s remarkable is that Lindell continues to push his debunked conspiracy theories even as he faces a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for what he said about them and their voting machines.
“Despite repeated warnings and efforts to share the facts with him, Mr. Lindell has continued to maliciously spread false claims about Dominion, each time giving empty assurances that he would come forward with overwhelming proof,” said the CEO of Dominion when the suit was filed back in February.
And Lindell has just kept at it – seemingly oblivious to the legal jeopardy he is putting himself in. He held a cyber-symposium in South Dakota in August where he touted that he would have definitive proof of widespread voter fraud. He, um, didn’t make good on that promise.
Lindell seems entirely determined to continue on his flights of fantasy, facts (and legal problems) be damned.