Clark County's Clerk Disputes Claims of MyPillow CEO Regarding Switched Ballots in 2020 Election
Friday, August 6th, 2021 -- 3:01 PM
(CNN) -Since the presidential election, Christina Jensen says she's been stopped on the street several times by acquaintances who wanted to share troubling news: hackers from Beijing had switched nearly 24,000 votes for Donald Trump in their rural, GOP-leaning Wisconsin county.
According to CNN, Jensen, the Clark County clerk and a Republican herself, has patiently explained that the local election computer system isn't connected to the internet and the county has less than 17,000 registered voters overall.
But she finds herself unable to convince those constituents of the simple fact that the election wasn't stolen: "They are like, 'Well, Mike Lindell says this,'" Jensen said.
Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and a close ally of former President Donald Trump, has emerged as one of the most vocal boosters still pushing false claims about the 2020 election.
In a series of so-called documentaries, Lindell has advanced an increasingly outlandish theory that foreign hackers broke into the computer systems of election offices like Clark County to switch votes, in what he has described as the "biggest cyber-crime in world history."
Election officials at more than a dozen counties that Lindell has claimed were hacking targets told CNN that the pillow magnate's claims are utterly meritless.
They noted that their voting machines are not connected to the internet, that the results are confirmed by paper ballots, and in some cases that official audits, recounts, or reviews have verified their vote tallies.
In addition, CNN interviewed nine cybersecurity experts, all of whom said the "proof" Lindell has released so far is nonsense, and that there is zero evidence of any kind of successful hacking of last year's election results.
But many Americans are buying into baseless claims of vote fraud: polls have found that roughly two-thirds of Republicans believe President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.
And while Lindell isn't as prominent as other right-wing figures denying the election results, including the former President himself, his rhetoric has broken through among some of the Trump faithful.
Jensen said she watched Lindell's video "Absolute Proof," which claims that 23,909 votes for Trump had been switched in her county, after a concerned voter emailed her a link to it.
"It made me angry," she said. "He has created a lot of doubt in a lot of peoples' minds, even though the count was accurate." Trump won the county with a margin of more than 5,000 votes.
Lindell, who once considered running for Minnesota governor or other elected office, has become persona non grata in mainstream conservative circles.
He's been booted from Twitter for violating its policy on sharing election fraud claims, and his videos have been swiftly removed from YouTube and other platforms. His pillows have been taken off the shelves at retailers such as Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl's.
And he and his company are facing a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion, which Lindell has falsely accused of being involved in voter fraud.
Now, Lindell is resorting to a last-ditch attempt to promote his theory, planning a "cyber symposium" this month in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he says he will release 37 terabytes of data showing election hacking.
In a rambling and combative interview with CNN, Lindell insisted that he had proof the election was stolen. "I'm not wrong. I've checked it out. I've spent millions," he claimed. "You need to trust me and come there." Election officials say Lindell's conspiracies are undermining faith in the voting system.
Scott McDonell, the clerk for Dane County, Wisconsin, another county where Lindell has claimed hacking switched thousands of votes from Trump to Biden, said that out of all the election theories he's heard, Lindell's is "the worst one because it's the dumbest."
The county conducted a hand recount of every ballot, paid for by Trump's campaign, which verified Biden's win. And every ballot in the state has a paper trail.
"It's damaging to our democracy," McDonell said of Lindell's claims. "Spurious allegations spread on the internet because they affirm what you want to believe."
Since Trump's loss last fall, Lindell has been a superspreader of election misinformation.
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