MyPillow CEO's $5M 'Prove Mike Wrong' election-fraud challenge leads to arbitration win for claimant
MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell on April 4 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Photo by Wilfredo Lee/The Associated Press.
MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell must make good on his offer to pay $5 million to anyone who could disprove his election-fraud data, an arbitration panel ruled Wednesday.
The panel directed Lindell’s company Lindell Management to pay $5 million to computer forensics expert Robert Zeidman, the Washington Post reports.
“They made a terribly wrong decision! This will be going to court!” Lindell said in a text to the Washington Post.
The contest rules of the “Prove Mike Wrong” election-fraud challenge had provided that disputes would be “resolved exclusively by final and binding arbitration” subject to “very limited review by courts,” according to the Washington Post. Zeidman’s lawyer Brian Glasser told the Washington Post that the arbitration award could be challenged in federal court as a “manifest injustice,” but such wins are “extremely rare.”
Lindell announced his challenge on the streaming online show The Glazov Gang. He said he would reveal “packet captures” showing Chinese government interference in the 2020 election, and he would pay $5 million to anybody who could show that the election data “was false, is not from the 2020 election.”
Packet captures are a file format for archiving internet traffic, the Washington Post explains.
Lindell handed out contest rules at an August 2021 “cyber symposium.” They provided that the winner of his contest would have to prove that Lindell’s data “does not reflect information related to the November 2020 election.” A claimant must disprove the data by a “100% degree of certainty” to win.
Zeidman said Lindell’s data consisted mostly of text or PDF files. When he unencrypted one file, it was a list of internet IP addresses. Others appeared to contain random numbers and letters. There were no packet captures.
“I have proven that the data Lindell provides … unequivocally does not contain packet data of any kind and do not contain any information related to the November 2020 election,” Zeidman concluded in a report.
Zeidman described himself as a moderate conservative who has voted twice for former President Donald Trump.
Lindell testified at the arbitration hearing that he decided not to share key data after his “red team” advisers advised him against its release.
“They said it could be a poison pill put in the data and we really shouldn’t release the China stuff,” he said.
