MyPillow founder Mike Lindell does not have to pay $5 million to a software developer who tried to disprove his 2020 election interference claims, a federal appeals court ruled.
Lindell, widely known as “MyPillow Guy,” claimed that China interfered with the 2020 election results and he had evidence to back it up. He then launched a “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge,” a stunt in which contestants tried to debunk his evidence, offering $5 million to anyone who could do it.
The judges in Lindell’s stunt didn’t believe Robert Zeidman, a software developer who participated, proved his case against Lindell’s claim, but an arbitration panel found that he won the challenge and ordered Lindell to pay him his winnings.
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the panel’s decision, finding “the arbitrators exceeded their powers.”
“It’s a great day for our country,” Lindell told the Associated Press. “This is a big win. It opens the door to getting rid of these electronic voting machines and getting paper ballots, hand-counted.”
Lindell hosted a “Cyber Symposium” in South Dakota in August 2021, when he showed data that he claimed to prove election interference.
He then dared skeptics to participate in the “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge,” offering the $5 million award.
Zeidman, who had been invited to the symposium, entered the challenge and submitted a 15-page report against his claims. The judge’s disagreed and said he did not prove Lindell wrong.
The arbitration panel disagreed, finding that the software developer had met that requirement and won the challenge by pointing out that Lindell’s so-called evidence didn’t contain voting machines’ data.
Lindell then filed a legal challenge to the judement. The appeals court found that the panel “effectively amended” the challenge’s rules, handing Lindell a victory.
“From the four corners of the Challenge contract as defined by the Official Rules, there is no way to read ‘information related to the November 2020 election’ as meaning only information that is packet capture data,” the appeals court found.
Zeidman, who previously told the New York Times that he is a Republican and voted for Donald Trump twice, believed Lindell’s claims posed a danger to democracy.
“A false narrative about election fraud is just really damaging to this country,” he told the Times.
Last month, a federal jury in Colorado found that Lindell defamed Eric Coomer, the former security and product strategy director at Dominion Voting Systems, when he accused him of treason. Lindell was ordered to pay Coomer $2.3 million in damages — a ruling that the MyPillow CEO said he plans to appeal.
