(AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)
ST. PAUL, Minn. (CBS Minnesota) – Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder who finished a distant second to Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth in the Aug. 11 Republican primary for governor, announced Wednesday that he will personally pay for a hand recount and audit of every paper ballot cast in that race.
Lindell said the effort is grounded in a right Minnesota law affords to candidates to request a full hand count of ballots even outside the narrow margin that triggers a state-funded recount.
“One of the few good election laws Minnesota does have is that as a candidate, I have the right to completely audit and hand count every ballot in the state,” Lindell said in the announcement, adding that he intends to use that right “to the full extent of the law.”
The move follows a lopsided loss, with the House speaker beating Lindell by roughly 11 percentage points. That gap is far outside the 0.25% threshold at which Minnesota pays for a recount automatically. A wider margin would mean that any recount would have to be requested and paid for by the candidate.
Minnesota law states that “an apparent losing candidate must submit a request for a discretionary recount along with the funds to cover the cost of the recount within five days of the canvass of a primary election.”
In an Aug. 18 letter to Lindell, Secretary of State General Counsel Lauren Bethke estimated the price of a full recount of the governor and lieutenant governor races at roughly $825,000. To move forward, Lindell would need to submit an official recount request along with a bond, cash, or surety covering that full amount. Bethke’s letter sets a deadline of Monday, Aug. 24, for that request and payment to reach the Secretary of State’s office.
The Secretary of State’s office also released a contingency plan spelling out exactly how a statewide hand recount would be run if Lindell posts the bond by Monday’s deadline. According to those documents, Paul Linnell, the office’s Director of Elections, would serve as State Recount Official, with authority to appoint deputy and assistant deputy officials to oversee counting at sites across the state. Under the plan, the recount would be open to the public and media.
There have been no official findings of fraud or irregularity in the Minnesota primary results. Nonetheless, on primary night, Lindell told reporters he would not concede until every vote was counted and that his team had spotted “anomalies” it needed time to review, though he offered no evidence at the time.
Lindell became a national figure after the 2020 election by promoting unproven claims that voting-machine companies had manipulated results for President Trump. Those claims led to costly legal fallout: Lindell settled a defamation suit with Dominion Voting Systems last month, and a judge separately found he had defamed Smartmatic, another voting-technology company, though damages in that case have not yet been determined.
Demuth is scheduled to face Sen. Amy Klobuchar in the Nov. 3 general election to succeed retiring Gov. Tim Walz.
Comments