Mike Lindell Bet $5M to Prove His Election Lies Wrong. Now He Has to Pay Up.

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and uber election conspiracy theorist, was so convinced of his own lies that he put $5 million of his own money up to anyone who could prove him wrong. On Wednesday, someone did.

Back in August 2021, Lindell was the central figure in pushing and funding the Big Lie, the bogus conspiracy that somehow the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. 

Backed by support from the former president and much of the mainstream Republican Party, Lindell made a bold bet. He said that if anyone could prove the data he shared at a so-called “cyber symposium” in South Dakota did not prove the election was rigged, he would pay them $5 million.

He called the competition the “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge.”

The data Lindell did provide to the security experts who showed up in Sioux Falls, which he claimed would show that China helped President Joe Biden “steal” the election, was quickly dismissed as “garbage”. While most of the world laughed and moved on, Robert Zeidman, a computer forensics expert and 63-year-old Trump voter from Nevada, took Lindell’s offer very seriously after he signed up for the contest.

Having pored over the 11 different files Lindell provided he concluded that it did not prove what the MyPillow CEO claimed and the data had, in fact, no connection to the 2020 vote at all. So he approached Lindell Management, which had organized the contest, and asked for his money.

They refused, but the competition’s rules stipulated that any disputes would be “resolved exclusively by final and binding arbitration.”

So Zeidman contacted a private arbitration panel, who on Wednesday ordered Lindell to pay up, according to copies of the 23-page ruling obtained by CNN and the Washington Post. 

“Based on the foregoing analysis, Mr. Zeidman performed under the contract,” the arbitration panel wrote in its decision. “He proved the data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data. Failure to pay Mr. Zeidman the $5 million prize was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover.”

“This will all end up in court,” Lindell told VICE News on Thursday before claiming that the arbitration panel’s findings were somehow part of the wider election conspiracy. "[Zeidman] was the only guy that was at that symposium that didn't say it was from the 2020 election. I think it's a big set-up. It's all part of a bigger cover up and we got to get rid of the electronic voting machines and go to paper ballots, hand-counted.”

Zeidman was not the only person who said the data was unrelated to the 2020 election. "He gave us experts NOTHING today, except random garbage that wastes our time," Rob Graham, a cyber security expert tweeted Wednesday.

Speaking in a video deposition to the arbitration panel obtained by CNN, Lindell explained the rationale of putting so much money at risk.

“I thought, well what if I put up a $5 million challenge out there, then it would get news, which it did,” Lindell said in the deposition. “So, then you got some attention.”

When asked if he regretted putting up the $5 million prize money, Lindell was adamant that he would do it again.

“Absolutely not, I would make it more. Are you kidding me? It’s all true. I put out the truth and what these guys did was horrible.”

And Lindell will get an opportunity to put his money where his mouth is again when he hosts another summit this August in Missouri, “It’s called the Election Crime Bureau summit and everything is gonna be poured out there that validates the last two years, that validates every single thing that's going on with these machines.”