My Pillow guy Mike Lindell is now causing big headaches for GOP secretaries of state and election officials as he pushes ever more ludicrous “Big Lie” claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
It was bad enough when Donald Trump pushed Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to order an audit of the votes in Texas’ four largest counties. Trump after all won Texas by six percentage points.
But Lindell has outdone Dear Leader. In September, he met with Alabama’s Republican secretary of state and governor to push claims that the state’s voting system had been hacked to flip 100,000 votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Trump won Alabama by a margin of 62% to 37%, or more than half a million votes.
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Trump loyalist,slapped that ridiculous claim down. Alabama doesn’t even use Dominion voting machines, not that it really matters.
“We didn’t have any vote changes. Zero. It’s not possible to have any vote changed,” Merrill said, according to the website AL.com.
But did that stop the Big Lie fluffer? Lindell then zeroed in on Idaho, the fifth Trumpiest state (Trump 64%-Biden 33%, a margin of more than 250,000 votes).
A website bearing Lindell’s copyright shared a document dubbed “The Big Lie” that claimed that votes cast for Trump had been switched electronically and recorded as votes for Biden in every Idaho county. It even had a spreadsheet listing how many votes had allegedly been switched in each county.
Idaho’s Republican Secretary of State Lawrence Denney released a statement refuting Lindell’s “Big Lie.”
Denney’s chief deputy Chad Houck said he immediately noticed a problem with Lindell’s claims.
“Once we had the document in hand, we immediately believed there was something amiss,” said Chief Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck. “This document alleged electronic manipulation in all 44 counties. At least 7 Idaho counties have no electronic steps in their vote counting processes. That was a huge red flag, and one we knew we could either prove or disprove fairly directly.”
Denney said his office “takes free, fair and accurate elections seriously, ”so when we are presented with allegations that come with specific details which we can examine, we want to do so.”
He then sent teams to supervise hand recounts in two small counties, Butte and Camas. A hand-recount in a third larger county, Bonner, is scheduled for this weekend.
This was no fraudit as in Arizona that went on for months and cost millions of dollars. The counties were so small that a hand recount could be done in a day with both Democratic and Republican observers present The recounts were video recorded and posted on the Secretary of State’s YouTube account.
The recount in Butte County showed that Biden’s vote count remained unchanged at 188, not 130 as alleged by Lindell’s spreadsheet. Trump’s number actually went down by nine votes from 1,202 in the original tally to 1,193 in the recount, Houck said.
In Camas County, Houck said that Biden’s vote tally remained unchanged at 149. The hand recount showed Trump with 508 votes, one more than in the original count.
In Bonner County, this weekend’s hand recount will be live streamed. The original vote tally shows Trump won Bonner by a margin of 18,369 votes to Biden’s 8,310. Lindell’s spreadsheet alleges that there was a 2,244-vote undercount for Trump.
Republican Mike Rosedale, Bonner’s elected county clerk, issued a press release last month in which he said:
“While I generally agree with Mike Lindell’s focus on massive voter fraud in 6-plus key states, his facts regarding Idaho quite miss the mark. Well, completely miss the mark.”
Rosedale said Lindell’s allegations prompted complaints to his office. He was particularly upset that no one from Lindell’s group ever contacted him. He would have pointed out that the county uses a machine to tally votes, but it is not connected to the Internet. He was miffed that Lindell claimed vote flips in every Idaho county even those without any electronic machines.
”What this means is that somebody just assigned a magic vote fraud number to all Idaho counties. Their goal appears to make a big splash. Shock and Awe. Every State. Oh the Horror. This should make your blood boil (Democrats AND Republicans),” he said.
There was “no verification or validation of claims. For the sake of apparently trying to make a big splash, he tarnished the reputations of possibly thousands of counties across the USA. Smooth move Mr. Lindell.”
But Lindell was unrepentant even when confronted with the recount figures from the two Idaho counties. He told Talking Points Memo that there’s always the possibility that his spreadsheets could be wrong about one county.
“It’s never happened before but I’m not saying it’s impossible for one to be off,” he said.
When TPM informed him that each of the county’s ballots had been individually recounted in front of observers from the Secretary of State’s office and both the Republican and Democratic parties, Lindell remained incredulous.
“When they say they’re hand-counting, are they looking at the actual person’s vote?” he asked before suggesting that the ballots could be counterfeit or cast on behalf of dead voters or people who’d moved.
“It’s more than just counting,” he said, adding later: “The ballots themselves are not real people.”
Houck, the Idaho’s SOS chief deputy, told TPM that his office had looked specifically at Lindell’s allegations about Idaho and found them be false.
“The fact is what they’re calling the truth is a full-on fabrication, at least in Idaho,” Houck told TPM.
Hey Pillow Guy when you’ve even lost Idaho Republican officials, perhaps it’s time to seek treatment. There’s a room padded with My Pillows just waiting for you, although that might be cruel and unusual punishment.