MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, remains confident that the “historical” lawsuits against voting machines that he’s pushing for will “succeed.”
In April, Lindell backed a lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction against voting machines in Arizona. The legal challenge was filed by state Representative Mark Finchem, a Republican, who is running to become the state’s secretary of state, and Kari Lake, a former television news journalist, who is running as a Republican to become the southwestern state’s governor.
“Yesterday was a historical day in history—in the history of America,” Lindell asserted during an interview with Right Side Broadcasting Network ahead of a Trump rally in Ohio the day after Lake and Finchem filed their suit. “We filed the first preliminary injunction in the state of Arizona to get rid of the machines once and for all.”
Speaking to The Guardian for an article published Thursday, Lindell said he believes the legal challenge, as well as others he plans to support, will “succeed.” The prominent Trump ally has repeatedly said that he plans to file similar lawsuits in “all 50 states.”
“I didn’t come all this way not to succeed. We’ve got to get rid of them all,” he told The Guardian.
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“There’s no reason they won’t succeed,” Lindell contended. He assessed that “the likelihood is very high.”
The MyPillow CEO has become key promoter of misinformation about the 2020 election, and has made a series of predictions and claims that have failed to materialize since early 2021. The wealthy Trump associate, who has said he spent some $35 million in his unsuccessful effort to overturn the 2020 election results and to ban voting machines, previously claimed that the Supreme Court would vote 9–0 to throw out the last presidential election results. He also argued that Trump would be “reinstated” as president, a claim that even other allies of the former president have pushed back against publicly.
Like Trump, the businessman claims that President Joe Biden only won in 2020 due to widespread voter fraud. Lindell alleges that voting machines were manipulated or hacked. Election and security experts have consistently debunked such claims, noting that the machines are not connected to the internet and have passed rigorous audits and reviews.
Additionally, hand recounts of paper ballots in key swing states across the countries have reaffirmed Trump’s loss to Biden. These audits have shown that the machine totals largely aligned with the paper ballots, with only minor and overall insignificant discrepancies.
While Lindell may remain confident that his efforts to ban voting machines will succeed, previous legal challenges to the 2020 election backed by Trump and his supporters have a record of losing in court. More than 60 election challenge lawsuits filed by the former president and his allies failed in state and federal courts across the country. Even Trump-appointed judges dismissed the cases.
Former Attorney General William Barr, who was widely viewed as one of Trump’s most loyal Cabinet members, has said repeatedly that there is “no evidence” to support claims of widespread voter fraud being behind the former president’s loss. Barr wrote in his memoir published in March that he told Trump directly to his face that the claims were “bulls**t.”
None of that has deterred Lindell, however. The MyPillow CEO continues to traverse the country in his effort to convince voters that U.S. elections are corrupt, attending many Trump rallies and other right-wing events. He told The Guardian that he aims to push for more lawsuits in Alabama, Colorado, Michigan, South Dakota, Texas and Wisconsin moving forward.
Alabama and South Dakota went for Trump by wide double-digit margins in 2020, with the former president garnering more than 60 percent of votes in the states. Texas was closer, but Trump still won there by more than 5 points.
Notably, Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State John Merrill previously rejected Lindell’s claim that the state’s election was hacked.
“The thing we have maintained is that we didn’t have any issues, any irregularities, any inconsistencies, any probing, any concerns that was introduced at any level to us,” Merrill told AL.com last October.
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s press office for comment.
Correction May 12, 2022 1:19 p.m. ET: A paragraph in a previous version of this article incorrectly stated, “Biden’s loss to Trump,” when it should have read, “Trump’s loss to Biden.”
