Mike Lindell celebrates victory after appeals court voids $5M award in election data dispute

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A federal appeals court handed a victory Wednesday to Mike Lindell, ruling that the MyPillow founder doesn’t have to pay a $5 million award to a software engineer who disputed data that Lindell claims proves that China interfered in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an arbitration panel overstepped its authority in 2023 when it awarded $5 million to the engineer, Robert Zeidman, of Las Vegas, who took Lindell up on his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge.”

“It’s a great day for our country,” a jubilant Lindell said in an interview. “This is a big win. It opens the door to getting rid of these electronic voting machines and getting paper ballots, hand-counted.”

Lindell, one of the country’s most prominent propagators of false claims that the 2020 election was a fraud, lost in a different case in Colorado last month. A jury ruled that Lindell defamed a former employee of a voting equipment company by accusing him of treason, and awarded $2.3 million in damages.

Lindell said he is appealing, and that he actually considers the verdict a victory because MyPillow itself wasn’t found liable.

President Donald Trump and his allies lost more than 50 court cases trying to overturn the 2020 election results, and his own attorney general at the time said there was no indication of wide-scale fraud.

As part of a “Cyber Symposium” Lindell hosted in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 2021, Lindell offered $5 million for anyone who could prove that “packet captures” and other data he released there were not valid data from the 2020 election.

Zeidman entered a 15-page report that he said proved the data wasn’t what Lindell claimed. Contest judges declined to declare Zeidman a winner, so he filed for arbitration under the contest rules. A panel of three arbitrators, including one named by Lindell, concluded that Zeidman had satisfied the rules and awarded him $5 million.

U.S. District Judge John Tunheim affirmed the award last year. He expressed concern about how the arbitrators interpreted what he called a “poorly written contract,” but he said courts have only limited authority to overrule arbitration awards and ordered Lindell to pay up.

But the appeals court ruled Wednesday that the arbitrators went beyond the contractual language of the official contest rules in deciding how to construe them, instead of sticking to the document itself. The appeals court said the rules were unambiguous, even if they might have favored Lindell.

“Whatever one might think of the logic of the panel’s reasoning, it is contrary to Minnesota law. … Fair or not, agreed-to contract terms may not be modified by the panel or by this court,” the appeals court wrote, and sent the case back to the lower court with instructions to vacate the $5 million award.

Zeidman attorney Brian Glasser urged people to read the arbitrators’ decision and “judge for themselves if the Eight Circuit’s decision today is more persuasive, or rings in truth louder, than the unanimous contrary decision of three arbitrators who heard all the evidence, including one appointed by Mr. Lindell.”