He was supposed to prove that the real winner of the 2020 election was Donald Trump by exposing the alleged Democratic fraud. In fact, the only lies exposed were his own.
Last February, a federal judge gave MyPillow creator and election denier Mike Lindell 30 days to pay a $5 million arbitration award after losing his “Prove Mike Wrong” 2020 campaign lawsuit.
Eight months after Joe Biden took office, Lindell organized a rally in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, promising to put Donald Trump back in the White House. The focal point of his three-day Cyber Symposium was an enigmatic computer data cache that Lindell had secretly obtained, which purported to demonstrate that Chinese hackers had tampered with American voting machines to ensure Biden’s win.
Bob Zeidman, 64, a participant who had previously voted twice for Trump, thought the claims could be accurate. But he was interested in seeing the vote-rigging proof Lindell claimed to have gathered.
According to Business Insider, Lindell paid around $1.5 million for his data from a software engineer named Dennis Montgomery. The latter is no stranger to the U.S. government: he had secured millions of dollars in Pentagon contracts in the early 2000s, having persuaded the CIA that he had developed software capable of intercepting terrorist signals obfuscated in Al Jazeera broadcasts.
However, it had all turned out to be a hoax: Montgomery’s program was referred to as “imaginary voodoo” and “bullshit” by a top CIA officer, and one of his own attorneys declared him “a habitual liar engaged in fraud.”
Nonetheless, Montgomery was hailed by Lindell as “one of the smartest people that has ever walked this Earth.” He was so confident about the truthfulness of Montgomery’s data that he offered a $5 million reward to anyone who could prove there was no evidence of electoral tampering—in the so-called “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge.
And Mike was indeed proven wrong.
Zeidman, a game theory enthusiast and poker player, found that the data was full of nonsensical characters and numbers, line after line, when he translated it into a Word document. “I confirmed that it was perfectly formatted, legitimate gibberish,” Zeidman stated. “In other words, it was a real Word document filled with gibberish, not a document that Word didn’t understand.” Furthermore, he realized the data files had a time stamp only a few days before the symposium, which suggests they were probably made specifically for it rather than being gathered from malfunctioning voting machines.
Confident that he had won, he submitted a critical report and electronically registered a copy with the US Copyright Office as evidence that he had completed it before the contest’s deadline. But after a few weeks, Lindell’s group declined to make the payment. They said that Zeidman had not fulfilled the conditions of the challenge, which required the winner to demonstrate “with 100 percent confidence” that the information was “unrelated to the election.”
The case was eventually resolved by an arbitration tribunal, which decided in Zeidman’s favor. A Minneapolis judge further validated the ruling in February.
U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim ruled that Robert Zeidman, the plaintiff in the case, “is awarded $5 million plus post-judgment interest beginning April 19, 2023, to be paid within 30 days of issuance of this Order, per the Arbitration Award.”
