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Election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell was ordered to pay $5 million to the electrical engineer and inventor who won the “Prove Mike Wrong” contest, in which Lindell offered the prize to anyone who could prove his data had nothing to do with the presidential election of 2020.
Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow that helped fund Donald Trump’s baseless election protests, was ordered to pay Robert Zeidman $5 million within 30 days in a ruling issued yesterday by the American Arbitration Association’s Commercial Arbitration Tribunal.
“Based on the foregoing analysis, Mr. Zeidman performed under contract,” a three-member arbitration panel wrote. The panel ruled that Zeidman proved that the files provided by Lindell to contest participants did not contain actual data from the election.
Zeidman proved that Lindell’s data “unambiguously did not reflect the November 2020 election data. Mr. Zeidman’s failure to pay the $5 million award was a breach of contract, entitling him to reinstatement,” the panel said.
“I am of course very happy with the decision of the arbitrators,” Zeidman said in a press release from his lawyers. “Obviously they saw this as I did: that the data we got at the symposium was not at all what Mr. Lindell said it was. The truth is finally known.’
The arbitration decision “declares unequivocally that Zeidman has proven Mike wrong,” the press release said. The arbitration panel ruling chided Lindell for defining “election data” too broadly:
In fact, it would be unreasonable to conclude that election data is “election data.” For example, newspaper articles and broadcast news about the elections are sent as data via the internet. It is unreasonable to conclude that a database of those accounts – or extracts from such a database – would qualify as election data in a contest. If such data were eligible, the Contest would not be a contest at all.
“This is going to court!”
Lindell appears ready to challenge the ruling in court. “They’ve made a terribly wrong decision! This is going to court!” he told The Washington Post in a text message.
Lindell gave a similar answer to CNN. “In a short phone interview with CNN, Lindell said ‘this will end up in court’ and took the media off the air claiming that it was necessary to get rid of electronic voting machines,” CNN reported.
Zeidman’s attorney, Brian Glasser, told The Washington Post that there is no direct appeal against the arbitration decision. To paraphrase Glasser, the Post wrote that “Lindell could ask a federal court to quash it on the grounds that it represented a ‘manifest injustice.’ According to Glasser, the legal grounds for such a claim are narrow and it comes” extremely rare’ for such a claim to succeed.”
Lindell claimed that while voting in the November 2020 U.S. election, he possessed a lot of data taken from the internet, and that his records showed China’s interference in the November 2020 election in several states.
“Mr Lindell testified that he was frustrated that his statements about China’s election meddling were not being taken seriously, and so decided to hold a ‘Cyber Symposium’,” the ruling said. “The aim of the symposium was to provide the data he had to prove China’s interference in the November 2020 elections. He invited the press, politicians and cyber experts to attend the symposium, which took place in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in August. 10 and 11, 2021.”
Lindell promised to provide “cyber data and packet recordings from the November 2020 election” and announced the Prove Mike Wrong contest. The competition announcement stated that entrants “have one goal. Find evidence that this cyber data is not valid data from the November election. For the people who find the evidence, their reward is 5 million.”
Lindell admitted at the arbitration hearing that he is unable to analyze the files himself and so relied on experts who “assured him that the data was real and proved China’s meddling in the election”.
