My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell has been ordered to shell out $5 million to an expert who debunked his data related to the 2020 election, according to a decision by the arbitration panel obtained by CNN.
Lindell, a purveyor of election conspiracies, vowed to award the multimillion-dollar sum to any cyber security expert who could disprove his data. An arbitration panel awarded Robert Zeidman, who has decades in software development experience, a $5 million payout on Wednesday after he sued Lindell over the sum....
Lindell convened a so-called “cyber symposium” in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 2021, designed to showcase the data he claimed to have obtained related to the 2020 election. He invited journalists, politicians and cybersecurity experts to attend.
“The symposium was to get the big audience and have all the media there and then they – the cyber guys – saying yes this data is from the 2020 election and you better look at how they intruded into our machines, our computers, and that was the whole purpose,” Lindell said in a deposition obtained by CNN.
He also announced a “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” – in which anyone who could prove his data was unrelated to the 2020 election could win the multimillion payout – to get more traction in the media for his election fraud claims.
“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.”
Zeidman signed up for the challenge, agreed to its contractual terms and discovered Lindell’s data to be largely nonsensical...
“The Contest did not require participants to disprove election interference. Thus, the contestants’ task was to prove the data presented to them was not valid data from the November 2020 election,” the arbitration panel wrote.
“The Panel was not asked to decide whether China interfered in the 2020 election. Nor was the Panel asked to decide whether Lindell LLC possessed data that proved such interference, or even whether Lindell LLC had election data in its possession,” according to the arbitration panel. “The focus of the decision is on the 11 files provided to Mr. Zeidman in the context of the Contest rules.”
The panel’s decision ticked through each of the data files provided Zeidman, determining repeatedly that the data was unrelated to the 2020 election.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/20/politics/mike-lindell-2020-election/index.html
