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Speaker 1: Jimmy Sangenberger here with you on KOA. And it is such a pleasure and a privilege to talk with you on a regular basis and to speak with newsmakers. Earlier this summer, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell ran for governor of Minnesota, moving from an election critic to putting his own name on the ballot. After he lost the Republican primary to Minnesota House Speaker Lisa DeMuth by 11 points, he called for a hand recount, offering to foot the bill and raising money to do it. When the state offered him one, he rejected their terms and took the fight all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court. But in that effort, he's hit on one very important fact about our elections. The paper ballots are the official physical record of elections in the United States. They just get counted using electronic tabulators, as we do here in Colorado, and they can be double-checked against the machine count in a hand recount to verify those results or in a paper ballot audit like Colorado's risk-limiting audit. To talk about this, I'm very pleased to be joined by Mike Lindell himself. Mike, thanks for the time here on KOA.
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Speaker 2: Hey, thanks for having me on.
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Speaker 1: So you have been at this longer and louder than just about anybody. Before we get to Minnesota and some of the hand recount stuff, can you lay it out briefly for us? What do you actually want American elections to look like?
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Speaker 3: Get rid of the voting machines once and for all. 132 countries have banned electronic voting machines. The last one was Argentina in August of 22. One judge said, hey, we've got to get rid of these machines. And they did it in four months, went to paper ballots, hand counted. They beat the Netherlands.
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Speaker 4: By a month.
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Speaker 3: I mean, all these countries are way ahead of the U.S. We can't use computers in our elections. And there's a reason that they don't. And I've been working on this now for six years since the stolen election of 2020. I've spent tens and tens of millions of dollars and set up a team of over 300,000 people in all 50 states called the Cause of America.
00:02:31
Speaker 4: I had the Election Crime Bureau.
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Speaker 3: But the end goal, no matter what, is to get to paper ballots, hand counted, absolutely no voting machines.
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Speaker 1: Now, I've been struck recently by some of the emails that you've put out through the Lindell Offense Fund. One line that resonates with me is, a paper record provides the actual tangible proof of a vote. This is the physical evidence that can be examined during an audit or a recount. And you add, we have to declare loudly that paper ballots, transparent counting procedures, independent audits, and the ability to verify election results is the standard for a real election and stand firm on that. To me, using paper ballots in and of themselves and transparency to verify results, you know, I'm very much with you on that. We have paper ballots here in Colorado. Is that fair to say then that kind of gets to the heart of it, especially when you're talking about recounts like this, like a hand recount?
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Speaker 3: No, and we will use Colorado for an example. When you have recounts in Colorado, i.e. Tina Peters in, I believe it was 2022, all the state did was recount them with electronic tabulators. Tabulators can say anything they want. And in Minnesota, you have the incoming paper that you put your ballot on, then it went into the tabulators. You don't have a sheet that comes out the other side, another form.
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Speaker 4: Of another piece of paper.
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Speaker 3: Now, there are states like California that has that, and we actually have one of our hand counting systems there. And there it's not, you're showing it on camera here, the ballots going into the tabulator. Now here's the number, the same ballot coming out the other side. So you're actually, when you're counting them, that's actually your audit too. So there's different things when you say, like in Minnesota, I had the right to do a paper ballot hand counted audit. That's different than tabulators sticking the same paper back into the same tabulators.
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Speaker 4: And that computer can tell you anything it wants.
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Speaker 3: So that, you know, like when Colorado, everyone says, well, we already have paper ballots.
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Speaker 4: You know what? There's paper all.
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Speaker 3: Over the United States, but they're not hand counted. It's all done with computers. All of them are on the internet. They're all done on everything's online. And, um, And we don't have secure elections here in the United States, not even close.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting since you brought up Tina Peters and we are. talking in Colorado for me. In January 2021, Republican Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis went to Tina and said, look, I'm hearing concerns about the 2020 election and the presidential results in particular. And he offered Tina the exact thing that this email you put out is talking about and so forth when you're talking and what you were just saying in terms of a hand recount of the paper ballots. Let's do a hand recount of the paper ballots against the machine totals, and that would hopefully settle the issue. And the county commissioners, he stressed, would actually pay for it. Unfortunately, Tina in January of 2021 said no, declined to do that hand recount. And then, of course, four months later, you had the events that got her into some legal trouble.
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Speaker 2: But Help me square that one here.
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Speaker 1: Do you think, don't you think that Tina Peters should have taken that opportunity to do a hand recount paid for by the county commissioners in Mesa and check that paper count against the electronic count?
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Speaker 3: Well, you're going back now to January of 21. This is where I got involved in everything right after the big election in 2020. I've said it many times, the most important election in the United States history will be the 2020 election.
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Speaker 1: Why?
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Speaker 3: Because it opens people's eyes to everything that's going on and wrong with our system. At that time, Tina did not know, like she said, a lot of these clerks around the country going, why do we have to do that and waste some money on that? I know what I'm doing, I'm very secure, and they trusted the machines, they trusted the computers.
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Speaker 4: There was too much trust put in these computers.
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Speaker 3: But when you have deviations and anomalies that happened in the 2020 election, like Pennsylvania having more votes than voters, that's impossible, unless there were computers. It's just like my election we can get to in Minnesota, which kind of explains it all. There's many clerks just like Tina that have refused paper ballot recounts.
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Speaker 4: You wouldn't even believe it.
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Speaker 3: It's mostly, believe it or not, Republicans that I've dealt with over the last six years. I would think I would be able to go to Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Dakota and.
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Speaker 4: Say, hey, look at your voter rolls. I'll give an example.
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Speaker 3: In Alabama, I said, this was back in the day, John Merrill, their Secretary of State, he's a Republican. I said, John, remember, I bought everybody's voter rolls in the whole United States.
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Speaker 4: I paid $ 40, 000 for Alabama's.
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Speaker 3: I said, John, look at, in this 2020 election, it shows here, the machine numbers show that you had 4,662 people that voted over the age of 110.
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Speaker 4: Some of them are 150 years old.
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Speaker 3: And John looked at me and said, well, Mike, we live pretty good here in Alabama.
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Speaker 4: I thought he was kidding. He wasn't kidding.
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Speaker 3: He just never looked into it, never wanted to do a paper ballot recount against that and find out how.
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Speaker 4: This is even possible.
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Speaker 2: And that's fair.
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Speaker 4: Because it's not possible.
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Speaker 1: But I want to understand, certainly, I want to bring it back, though, to that hand recount notion, though, because... You are talking about taking the paper ballots that are the official record, right? And using that official record for a recount by hand.
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Speaker 2: That's your preference, right? Just to be clear.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, you need to understand there's two things with these machines.
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Speaker 4: Let's use Minnesota.
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Speaker 3: In Minnesota, you actually fill out the paper ballot, okay? That goes into the tabulator. They're all counted, and the numbers came out that night, okay? There are some places where you just have a screen, and you just tap the screen, and that will.
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Speaker 4: Push out a paper.
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Speaker 3: Now, that computer could be doing anything it wants, but either way, by doing a paper ballot hand-counted, you would be.
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Speaker 4: Able to catch, and we have... computer manipulation.
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Speaker 3: So I'll give an example in Minnesota, and we can go through that one. In my governor's race, I was favored by seven points. Two days before the election, the president reendorsed me. And the night of the election at the watch party on August 11th, We watched the seven Republican candidates.
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Speaker 4: It was like synchronized swimming.
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Speaker 3: Every time there was an update in the votes, I got exactly 31 percent. Lisa got 40. Kendall got 22 and all down the ticket.
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Speaker 4: It was exact.
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Speaker 3: And it didn't matter if the votes came from northern Minnesota, my home county, the inner city, early voting or late voting. You can see right in front of you the computer manipulation 55 times.
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Speaker 4: Numbers went in reverse.
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Speaker 3: That's impossible when you're counting, obviously, unless you've done something with the computer. And so when this came to the next day, We knew that there was computer manipulation throughout.
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Speaker 4: Now, was the election stalled? I believe it was.
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Speaker 3: But for 100%, we knew that there was computer manipulation. Well, in Minnesota, one of the few good laws we have in Minnesota when it comes to elections is the person has the right to a paper ballot hand count recount if they want to pay for it.
00:10:35
Speaker 4: I said, you know what?
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Speaker 3: I'm paying for it. And they told me it'd be about 400,000. They doubled the price within a week to 825,000. Then on the day as we're ready to wire the money, the Secretary of State's office said, we've decided, the committee's decided, we're only gonna count 380,000 of the 1.1 million ballots. And I said, why would you do that? My name is on all 1.1 million ballots. And we got into it. They said, well, we're just going to count between you and Lisa and just whoever voted for you or voted for Lisa. I said, no, I need all 1.1 million. That's what our Constitution, that's what our laws say in Minnesota. So they denied it. We took it to the Supreme Court in Minnesota. They denied it. They said, well, this committee had the right. They didn't have precedence, but we believe they had the right to change the rules on you at zero hour. So what we did then is there's 87 counties in Minnesota. We have put a task force team together, which I have in every county. And we have collected data at the ground level that came out of these machines. This is cast vote records, voter rolls, you name it. And what we have found so far, I'll give an example. One of the down ticket guys, he had 14 votes, said he had 14- Hold.
00:12:03
Speaker 2: On, Mike, can I jump in? Because we're low on time and.
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Speaker 1: I want to make sure, Mike, to be able to get to the heart of the matter with the recount because you're adding in a number of things which I understand are a value to discuss, but I really want to focus in on the hand recount aspect that you were talking about because you wanted a hand recount, and I understand some of the reasons why you didn't accept the hand recount.
00:12:29
Speaker 2: What I'm curious about There was.
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Speaker 3: Only one reason, and that was because they weren't going to count all 1.1 million ballots when that's what I was paying for. They had to ask every county in Minnesota how much they would charge me, and they got that number. It was $ 825, 000.
00:12:45
Speaker 4: I had the money there. I showed them the money I was going to pay it, and they said, by the way.
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Speaker 3: We're only counting one-third of the ballots, a little less than a third of the ballots. I said, you need to count all the ballots.
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Speaker 2: I've never heard of such a thing. My understanding, can I just clarify, Mike?
00:13:02
Speaker 1: My understanding was that the recount would have been of the ballots that voted for you and the ballots that voted for Lisa DeMuth, not the others. So how is that a third of the ballots when you add you guys up together and that's a majority of the votes?
00:13:19
Speaker 3: No, on the ballot was also Democrats. There was 1.1 million ballots. 700,000, they say, Democrats went out to vote for Amy Klobuchar in the Democrat primary, and she was already a shoo-in. So what we're finding now at the ground level, that that's not even true. There were people that voted Republican, that they're showing on there that they voted Democrat.
00:13:48
Speaker 4: These are things we're finding out.
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Speaker 3: And just like I said, If you had just me and Lisa, if you took, well, here's my, that added up to 300 and some thousand of the balance. Okay, there was 400 and some, 430,000, let's say, Republicans that voted, and then maybe 700,000 Democrats. Sure. But I wanted to see, this is where the computers can do whatever they want. How many people, these Democrats over here, who are these people? Where did they come from? We're finding out that a lot of them, the names don't exist. There's so many things we're finding out. There's people that are on the voter rolls illegally. But the most important thing we found so far was there was seven Republicans on there. The machine said, I'll give an example of one county. This bottom guy named, oh, I think, let's say it was Ryan. I can't remember his name. He's the number six Republican. And this guy got 14 votes.
00:14:48
Speaker 4: Mike, we're talking about your race. And I got zero.
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Speaker 3: But in reality, when we got to the actual number with the paper ballots, with the counts that we got at this county level, I got 14, he got zero. So the computer flipped the two. They took 14 votes from me and gave it to a Republican on the down ticket.
00:15:06
Speaker 1: Mike, hold on, hold on. You don't know that. You have no actual evidence specifically for that. But I really want to get to... this particular aspect, which is the thing that I kind of can't... First of all, I agree. I think that there should have been, at least of all the Republican candidates run, they should have done a full recount. Whether the state law allows for them, as specifically says, will require you to just do the top two vote-getters in the candidate challenging.
00:15:34
Speaker 4: That's not what it says. The state law says... All.
00:15:37
Speaker 3: Ballots will be recounted of the governor's race, all of them, including the Democrats.
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Speaker 2: That's our law.
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Speaker 4: That's our law.
00:15:44
Speaker 2: Sure, sure.
00:15:46
Speaker 1: Except the Supreme Court of the state of Minnesota said otherwise, which is why you're going to appeal to the U.S.
00:15:51
Speaker 2: Supreme Court, right?
00:15:53
Speaker 4: No, no, the U.S.
00:15:54
Speaker 3: Supreme Court will not take it. So what we're doing, what we're doing after they said these guys could make this change, this corrupt change that they did at the last minute, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Minnesota Supreme Court said this. So what we did, we took it to the ground level, all 87 counties. And what I'm doing, and you'll see it this week, we are taking all... The voting machines to court and we're gonna get them as product liabilities, defective products.
00:16:24
Speaker 4: Okay. These are supposed to put out.
00:16:26
Speaker 3: An election that is secure and to get a winner, okay?
00:16:30
Speaker 4: To get a winner, to secure election.
00:16:32
Speaker 3: If you had cars that all have bad brakes, you have a defective product. So I took these two lawsuits, I did it before in 2022 in Arizona. in Alabama, and I was going to do it in every state. It got thrown out on standing, and the lawyers were all sanctioned. Since then, this went to the US Supreme Court, and they said, no, you can question these machine companies, and you don't get sanctioned.
00:16:57
Speaker 4: You have every right to question them.
00:16:59
Speaker 2: I want to go back because we only have a few minutes.
00:17:01
Speaker 1: I really want to go back to the hand recount issue for a moment because the one thing that I can't square, we just got a few minutes, is that regardless of whether they wanted to do a full count of what you were saying, wanted to do a full recount of all of the different candidates in the governor's race, the state still offered you the chance to test exactly what we were talking about regarding a hand count, specifically of your ballots and DeMuth's checked against the electronic count, which would tell you something either way, wouldn't it? I mean, if the hand count for your ballots, the votes that you got, and the hand counts for DeMuth, what she got, matches the machines, then those results check out. If it doesn't, then now you've got a solid case that something's wrong. Either way, you get an answer that you can pursue. Why not take the test? What am I missing here?
00:18:02
Speaker 3: You're missing this. You need to have all the ballots. If you take a Mike Lindell ballot and the computer says it was whatever, Kendall Qualls, for example, Kendall, how am I gonna see that that ballot that was for Mike Lindell actually went to Kendall Qualls?
00:18:26
Speaker 4: You understand?
00:18:27
Speaker 3: So the reports that came out of all the machines and all the precincts, so you had this report, Kendall Qualls got 14 votes. And then you look at it and you know Kendall didn't get 14, Mike Lindell got those 14.
00:18:40
Speaker 4: That's why you need all the ballots.
00:18:43
Speaker 3: If you're counting a deck of cards and you have 52 cards, you wanna see if all the cards are there. You don't count 20 of them and say, it looks like they're all here. You have to have the other ballots, all the other ballots, because if any ballot, if the machine can tell you whatever it wants, if the machine says Mike Lindell only got 100 votes in this county, and then you look in that county And Kendall Qualls got 70, and Mike Lindell only got 30. But the machine said Mike Lindell got 100. There's your problem. You can't tell it by here's Lisa Demuth, here's Mike Lindell. The machine said this is what these two got. But you have to prove with the paper ballots that it's not true. So you need all 1.1 million ballots to see what those computers did and told the public. And they didn't give me that. And I offered, I said, I'll pay whatever you want. They doubled the price. This wasn't for one third. It was for every single county to count every ballot. And that's what Minnesota law says. And that's what I offered to do. They were worried about it.
00:19:48
Speaker 4: I know they were because it was.
00:19:50
Speaker 3: Been found out. What we're finding out right now is exactly what.
00:19:53
Speaker 4: I just said.
00:19:54
Speaker 3: Just one precinct, a down ticket, let's say it was Kendall, got 14 votes on the paper ballots. It was for Mike Lindell, not him. So that alone proves that we're coming out with all this stuff in our report as we sue these.
00:20:11
Speaker 4: Machine companies now as defective devices.
00:20:14
Speaker 2: So eventually I'll get what I want.
00:20:16
Speaker 4: And that's to get rid of these voting machines in our country.
00:20:19
Speaker 2: I'm out of time. 30 seconds, if you can, real quick.
00:20:23
Speaker 1: Would you fund hand recounts across the country if a county said we'd accept it for certain races? Is that a priority for you to look at doing hand recounts like that?
00:20:37
Speaker 3: You have to have full-hand recounts for that whole precinct, or you can't see.
00:20:42
Speaker 4: You're only going to count part of the ballots. You absolutely have to have that.
00:20:46
Speaker 3: And because what people do, what counties do, oh, if you're this close, if you're not this close, you don't get to do a recount. A lot of things are like that. They don't even offer you to pay for one. Minnesota does. I took up their offer, and they shut it down. What we need to do is melt down the voting machines and turn them into prison bars.
00:21:06
Speaker 2: All right, Mike Lindell, I got to leave it there. I'm sorry.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: I'm literally out of time getting the hook from our producer from A-Rod. I appreciate it. I'd love to talk with you more because there's so much more that we can dive into and discuss maybe in another forum or format. But I appreciate your time, Mike. Thanks for joining us here on KOA.
00:21:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you.
00:21:25
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:21:26
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. Jimmy and for Mandy, stay with us. I think it got a little combative and I didn't want it to get combative. I wanted to understand the whole point in terms of hand recounting and of paper ballots and really find out to an extent the sincerity there in terms of do you think that paper ballots should be recounted by hand when the opportunity presents itself. Just as an example, in the beginning of our discussion, I brought up Tina Peters and her opportunity to do a hand recount brought to her by Republican County Commissioner in Mesa when she was County Clerk in January 2021 to do a hand recount.
00:22:23
Speaker 2: Paid for by the county.
00:22:26
Speaker 1: And I kind of thought that early on, that would be a point of clear agreement that Mike Lindell and I could have that he would agree, yes, she should have taken the opportunity to do a hand recount, a full hand recount.
00:22:44
Speaker 2: And he didn't give that answer.
00:22:45
Speaker 1: So that was puzzling and then shifted gears and what have you. And we went into some of these other things and, you know, you only have 20 ish minutes for a conversation. And the opportunity in a conversation like that to keep it focused on specific things can be a challenge. And that was, that was the case there is I wanted to really discuss more into the recount and recount and stuff and, and not some of the other things.
00:23:18
Speaker 2: Issues that he had brought up.
00:23:20
Speaker 1: And certainly, the text line has been all abuzz during that conversation. And it's important to hear different voices and perspectives when you can challenge and talk about it and hash things out.
00:23:38
Speaker 2: Look, the reality of.
00:23:39
Speaker 1: The situation in Colorado is that We all get paper ballots. Now, you can critique the mail ballot system. You can critique getting the voter rolls in shape and all of those things. But the fact is that every voter receives a voter verified paper ballot and you fill it out and you return it either by mail or in a drop box or at a vote center. And when you go to a vote center and you request a new ballot, they'll give you a paper ballot. Those ballots are there, and they are required to be retained for something like 25, 26 months under state law. And you can go back and do a hand recount and pay for the hand recount if you want. But it's going to cost you more, but you can do it. You can do these reviews. We have a risk-limiting audit as well. I was on the Canvas board for.
00:24:43
Speaker 1: Republicans in Arapahoe County several years back on two occasions. And you have the risk limiting on it where all of the, there's a selection of ballots that are selected and randomly, and all the election judges there and so forth, they check that physical record, physical ballot, against the electronic record for that ballot as assigned by a barcode, basically, or the number that's printed on the ballot when it is scanned during the initial counting. And with the risk-limiting audit, you have a separate system. It's not the software that's used to tabulate the results. It's separate proprietary software to the state. And you can cross-check, okay, here's what the electronic count had.
00:25:47
Speaker 2: Here's the physical paper. I literally did this.
00:25:51
Speaker 1: With my Democrat cohort, counterpart rather. You look down at your ballot, the ballot in front of you, the paper ballot, you look at the screen, they check out, great, you mark it. We happened in one of those two elections to We happen to notice a discrepancy, a ballot that should not have been counted the way that it was counted during the election. But it was a human error in that it was flagged for adjudication for human review, went through the scanner, there was an issue, it was flagged for human review. The humans then had to look at the Secretary of State's guidebook, which is something that's been used for years and years. To be able to ascertain what did they mean? You can't not do that. You have to make a determination. What did this vote say? Because otherwise you got to throw it out and you can't just throw out a vote. And you don't know who it is because it's a secret ballot. So let's say it actually belongs to John Smith.
00:26:58
Speaker 2: You don't know that it's John Smith.
00:26:59
Speaker 1: So you can't go to John Smith and say, hey, did you mean to mark this candidate or that candidate? Yes or no on this ballot initiative. So you have to make a judgment. And they made the wrong judgment very clearly, made a mistake. And we said, look, there's a problem. This ballot's been counted wrong because of human error.
00:27:22
Speaker 2: And they were able to.
00:27:22
Speaker 1: Put that into that discrepancy and make note of that and what have you. no system's going to be perfect. And imagine if all ballots were hand counted, by the way, initially. This is why I like a hand recount when it's presented. And I think in Minnesota, they should have just said, yeah, let's do a hand recount of the entire governor's race.
00:27:44
Speaker 2: Like, just do it. For crying out loud.
00:27:51
Speaker 1: See if they'll play ball and actually allow the recount to go through. And the team that wants it If you allow everybody, will they actually do it?
00:28:00
Speaker 2: Because they didn't.
00:28:02
Speaker 1: Lindell's team didn't move forward with the recount because it didn't meet their specifications. But let's say it did. Then it's sort of a put up or shut up. You're going to actually let it go through? And it would have been really interesting to see. I think they should have done it regardless. Even if it's just Lindell and the other candidate, the top two, go ahead and do it. But the state should have pursued as well a full recount, why not, of the governor's race by hand to verify that the results were legit, especially if it's being paid for by Lindell. But to go back in Colorado, we have paper ballots and they get tabulated electronically. And human beings do that. Put them through the scanners, and they get tabulated, and they can be flagged for human review. And that may or may not change what that vote is counted as. Then the election's over. Then you have the risk-limiting audit that takes a statistical sample of ballots and cross-checks, does exactly what Lindell says he wants, which is to cross-check the physical paper ballots that with the electronic vote count for these ballots. It's not a full overhand recount, but it is still the physical paper ballot, the physical evidence checked against the electronic record that was counted for the results.
00:29:42
Speaker 2: And that's a pretty good system.
00:29:47
Speaker 1: And I would think that there should be common ground there in saying, okay, well, this is something we should be doing everywhere. I don't know that there's really common ground there. It depends on sincerity.
00:29:58
Speaker 2: Is this actually what you want?
00:30:03
Speaker 1: So it is a system that is imperfect as any system is, but at least you have some of those checks. And really, frankly, Tina Peters should have taken up Commissioner Cody Davis when he came to her and said, let's just do a recount just to make sure people are okay.
00:30:22
Speaker 2: You know, verify the results. And she said no. Why?
00:30:28
Speaker 1: Why haven't they moved forward with actual checks? hand recounts in these jurisdictions and what have you and paid for it with tens of millions of dollars out there.
Speaker 1: Jimmy Sangenberger here with you on KOA. And it is such a pleasure and a privilege to talk with you on a regular basis and to speak with newsmakers. Earlier this summer, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell ran for governor of Minnesota, moving from an election critic to putting his own name on the ballot. After he lost the Republican primary to Minnesota House Speaker Lisa DeMuth by 11 points, he called for a hand recount, offering to foot the bill and raising money to do it. When the state offered him one, he rejected their terms and took the fight all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court. But in that effort, he's hit on one very important fact about our elections. The paper ballots are the official physical record of elections in the United States. They just get counted using electronic tabulators, as we do here in Colorado, and they can be double-checked against the machine count in a hand recount to verify those results or in a paper ballot audit like Colorado's risk-limiting audit. To talk about this, I'm very pleased to be joined by Mike Lindell himself. Mike, thanks for the time here on KOA.
00:01:24
Speaker 2: Hey, thanks for having me on.
00:01:27
Speaker 1: So you have been at this longer and louder than just about anybody. Before we get to Minnesota and some of the hand recount stuff, can you lay it out briefly for us? What do you actually want American elections to look like?
00:01:43
Speaker 3: Get rid of the voting machines once and for all. 132 countries have banned electronic voting machines. The last one was Argentina in August of 22. One judge said, hey, we've got to get rid of these machines. And they did it in four months, went to paper ballots, hand counted. They beat the Netherlands.
00:02:03
Speaker 4: By a month.
00:02:04
Speaker 3: I mean, all these countries are way ahead of the U.S. We can't use computers in our elections. And there's a reason that they don't. And I've been working on this now for six years since the stolen election of 2020. I've spent tens and tens of millions of dollars and set up a team of over 300,000 people in all 50 states called the Cause of America.
00:02:31
Speaker 4: I had the Election Crime Bureau.
00:02:33
Speaker 3: But the end goal, no matter what, is to get to paper ballots, hand counted, absolutely no voting machines.
00:02:41
Speaker 1: Now, I've been struck recently by some of the emails that you've put out through the Lindell Offense Fund. One line that resonates with me is, a paper record provides the actual tangible proof of a vote. This is the physical evidence that can be examined during an audit or a recount. And you add, we have to declare loudly that paper ballots, transparent counting procedures, independent audits, and the ability to verify election results is the standard for a real election and stand firm on that. To me, using paper ballots in and of themselves and transparency to verify results, you know, I'm very much with you on that. We have paper ballots here in Colorado. Is that fair to say then that kind of gets to the heart of it, especially when you're talking about recounts like this, like a hand recount?
00:03:35
Speaker 3: No, and we will use Colorado for an example. When you have recounts in Colorado, i.e. Tina Peters in, I believe it was 2022, all the state did was recount them with electronic tabulators. Tabulators can say anything they want. And in Minnesota, you have the incoming paper that you put your ballot on, then it went into the tabulators. You don't have a sheet that comes out the other side, another form.
00:04:08
Speaker 4: Of another piece of paper.
00:04:10
Speaker 3: Now, there are states like California that has that, and we actually have one of our hand counting systems there. And there it's not, you're showing it on camera here, the ballots going into the tabulator. Now here's the number, the same ballot coming out the other side. So you're actually, when you're counting them, that's actually your audit too. So there's different things when you say, like in Minnesota, I had the right to do a paper ballot hand counted audit. That's different than tabulators sticking the same paper back into the same tabulators.
00:04:46
Speaker 4: And that computer can tell you anything it wants.
00:04:49
Speaker 3: So that, you know, like when Colorado, everyone says, well, we already have paper ballots.
00:04:54
Speaker 4: You know what? There's paper all.
00:04:55
Speaker 3: Over the United States, but they're not hand counted. It's all done with computers. All of them are on the internet. They're all done on everything's online. And, um, And we don't have secure elections here in the United States, not even close.
00:05:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting since you brought up Tina Peters and we are. talking in Colorado for me. In January 2021, Republican Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis went to Tina and said, look, I'm hearing concerns about the 2020 election and the presidential results in particular. And he offered Tina the exact thing that this email you put out is talking about and so forth when you're talking and what you were just saying in terms of a hand recount of the paper ballots. Let's do a hand recount of the paper ballots against the machine totals, and that would hopefully settle the issue. And the county commissioners, he stressed, would actually pay for it. Unfortunately, Tina in January of 2021 said no, declined to do that hand recount. And then, of course, four months later, you had the events that got her into some legal trouble.
00:06:02
Speaker 2: But Help me square that one here.
00:06:04
Speaker 1: Do you think, don't you think that Tina Peters should have taken that opportunity to do a hand recount paid for by the county commissioners in Mesa and check that paper count against the electronic count?
00:06:18
Speaker 3: Well, you're going back now to January of 21. This is where I got involved in everything right after the big election in 2020. I've said it many times, the most important election in the United States history will be the 2020 election.
00:06:34
Speaker 1: Why?
00:06:35
Speaker 3: Because it opens people's eyes to everything that's going on and wrong with our system. At that time, Tina did not know, like she said, a lot of these clerks around the country going, why do we have to do that and waste some money on that? I know what I'm doing, I'm very secure, and they trusted the machines, they trusted the computers.
00:06:55
Speaker 4: There was too much trust put in these computers.
00:06:58
Speaker 3: But when you have deviations and anomalies that happened in the 2020 election, like Pennsylvania having more votes than voters, that's impossible, unless there were computers. It's just like my election we can get to in Minnesota, which kind of explains it all. There's many clerks just like Tina that have refused paper ballot recounts.
00:07:21
Speaker 4: You wouldn't even believe it.
00:07:22
Speaker 3: It's mostly, believe it or not, Republicans that I've dealt with over the last six years. I would think I would be able to go to Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Dakota and.
00:07:33
Speaker 4: Say, hey, look at your voter rolls. I'll give an example.
00:07:36
Speaker 3: In Alabama, I said, this was back in the day, John Merrill, their Secretary of State, he's a Republican. I said, John, remember, I bought everybody's voter rolls in the whole United States.
00:07:48
Speaker 4: I paid $ 40, 000 for Alabama's.
00:07:51
Speaker 3: I said, John, look at, in this 2020 election, it shows here, the machine numbers show that you had 4,662 people that voted over the age of 110.
00:07:59
Speaker 4: Some of them are 150 years old.
00:08:05
Speaker 3: And John looked at me and said, well, Mike, we live pretty good here in Alabama.
00:08:08
Speaker 4: I thought he was kidding. He wasn't kidding.
00:08:11
Speaker 3: He just never looked into it, never wanted to do a paper ballot recount against that and find out how.
00:08:17
Speaker 4: This is even possible.
00:08:18
Speaker 2: And that's fair.
00:08:19
Speaker 4: Because it's not possible.
00:08:20
Speaker 1: But I want to understand, certainly, I want to bring it back, though, to that hand recount notion, though, because... You are talking about taking the paper ballots that are the official record, right? And using that official record for a recount by hand.
00:08:35
Speaker 2: That's your preference, right? Just to be clear.
00:08:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, you need to understand there's two things with these machines.
00:08:42
Speaker 4: Let's use Minnesota.
00:08:44
Speaker 3: In Minnesota, you actually fill out the paper ballot, okay? That goes into the tabulator. They're all counted, and the numbers came out that night, okay? There are some places where you just have a screen, and you just tap the screen, and that will.
00:09:00
Speaker 4: Push out a paper.
00:09:01
Speaker 3: Now, that computer could be doing anything it wants, but either way, by doing a paper ballot hand-counted, you would be.
00:09:11
Speaker 4: Able to catch, and we have... computer manipulation.
00:09:16
Speaker 3: So I'll give an example in Minnesota, and we can go through that one. In my governor's race, I was favored by seven points. Two days before the election, the president reendorsed me. And the night of the election at the watch party on August 11th, We watched the seven Republican candidates.
00:09:36
Speaker 4: It was like synchronized swimming.
00:09:38
Speaker 3: Every time there was an update in the votes, I got exactly 31 percent. Lisa got 40. Kendall got 22 and all down the ticket.
00:09:46
Speaker 4: It was exact.
00:09:48
Speaker 3: And it didn't matter if the votes came from northern Minnesota, my home county, the inner city, early voting or late voting. You can see right in front of you the computer manipulation 55 times.
00:10:00
Speaker 4: Numbers went in reverse.
00:10:01
Speaker 3: That's impossible when you're counting, obviously, unless you've done something with the computer. And so when this came to the next day, We knew that there was computer manipulation throughout.
00:10:15
Speaker 4: Now, was the election stalled? I believe it was.
00:10:17
Speaker 3: But for 100%, we knew that there was computer manipulation. Well, in Minnesota, one of the few good laws we have in Minnesota when it comes to elections is the person has the right to a paper ballot hand count recount if they want to pay for it.
00:10:35
Speaker 4: I said, you know what?
00:10:37
Speaker 3: I'm paying for it. And they told me it'd be about 400,000. They doubled the price within a week to 825,000. Then on the day as we're ready to wire the money, the Secretary of State's office said, we've decided, the committee's decided, we're only gonna count 380,000 of the 1.1 million ballots. And I said, why would you do that? My name is on all 1.1 million ballots. And we got into it. They said, well, we're just going to count between you and Lisa and just whoever voted for you or voted for Lisa. I said, no, I need all 1.1 million. That's what our Constitution, that's what our laws say in Minnesota. So they denied it. We took it to the Supreme Court in Minnesota. They denied it. They said, well, this committee had the right. They didn't have precedence, but we believe they had the right to change the rules on you at zero hour. So what we did then is there's 87 counties in Minnesota. We have put a task force team together, which I have in every county. And we have collected data at the ground level that came out of these machines. This is cast vote records, voter rolls, you name it. And what we have found so far, I'll give an example. One of the down ticket guys, he had 14 votes, said he had 14- Hold.
00:12:03
Speaker 2: On, Mike, can I jump in? Because we're low on time and.
00:12:08
Speaker 1: I want to make sure, Mike, to be able to get to the heart of the matter with the recount because you're adding in a number of things which I understand are a value to discuss, but I really want to focus in on the hand recount aspect that you were talking about because you wanted a hand recount, and I understand some of the reasons why you didn't accept the hand recount.
00:12:29
Speaker 2: What I'm curious about There was.
00:12:32
Speaker 3: Only one reason, and that was because they weren't going to count all 1.1 million ballots when that's what I was paying for. They had to ask every county in Minnesota how much they would charge me, and they got that number. It was $ 825, 000.
00:12:45
Speaker 4: I had the money there. I showed them the money I was going to pay it, and they said, by the way.
00:12:49
Speaker 3: We're only counting one-third of the ballots, a little less than a third of the ballots. I said, you need to count all the ballots.
00:12:57
Speaker 2: I've never heard of such a thing. My understanding, can I just clarify, Mike?
00:13:02
Speaker 1: My understanding was that the recount would have been of the ballots that voted for you and the ballots that voted for Lisa DeMuth, not the others. So how is that a third of the ballots when you add you guys up together and that's a majority of the votes?
00:13:19
Speaker 3: No, on the ballot was also Democrats. There was 1.1 million ballots. 700,000, they say, Democrats went out to vote for Amy Klobuchar in the Democrat primary, and she was already a shoo-in. So what we're finding now at the ground level, that that's not even true. There were people that voted Republican, that they're showing on there that they voted Democrat.
00:13:48
Speaker 4: These are things we're finding out.
00:13:50
Speaker 3: And just like I said, If you had just me and Lisa, if you took, well, here's my, that added up to 300 and some thousand of the balance. Okay, there was 400 and some, 430,000, let's say, Republicans that voted, and then maybe 700,000 Democrats. Sure. But I wanted to see, this is where the computers can do whatever they want. How many people, these Democrats over here, who are these people? Where did they come from? We're finding out that a lot of them, the names don't exist. There's so many things we're finding out. There's people that are on the voter rolls illegally. But the most important thing we found so far was there was seven Republicans on there. The machine said, I'll give an example of one county. This bottom guy named, oh, I think, let's say it was Ryan. I can't remember his name. He's the number six Republican. And this guy got 14 votes.
00:14:48
Speaker 4: Mike, we're talking about your race. And I got zero.
00:14:50
Speaker 3: But in reality, when we got to the actual number with the paper ballots, with the counts that we got at this county level, I got 14, he got zero. So the computer flipped the two. They took 14 votes from me and gave it to a Republican on the down ticket.
00:15:06
Speaker 1: Mike, hold on, hold on. You don't know that. You have no actual evidence specifically for that. But I really want to get to... this particular aspect, which is the thing that I kind of can't... First of all, I agree. I think that there should have been, at least of all the Republican candidates run, they should have done a full recount. Whether the state law allows for them, as specifically says, will require you to just do the top two vote-getters in the candidate challenging.
00:15:34
Speaker 4: That's not what it says. The state law says... All.
00:15:37
Speaker 3: Ballots will be recounted of the governor's race, all of them, including the Democrats.
00:15:42
Speaker 2: That's our law.
00:15:44
Speaker 4: That's our law.
00:15:44
Speaker 2: Sure, sure.
00:15:46
Speaker 1: Except the Supreme Court of the state of Minnesota said otherwise, which is why you're going to appeal to the U.S.
00:15:51
Speaker 2: Supreme Court, right?
00:15:53
Speaker 4: No, no, the U.S.
00:15:54
Speaker 3: Supreme Court will not take it. So what we're doing, what we're doing after they said these guys could make this change, this corrupt change that they did at the last minute, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Minnesota Supreme Court said this. So what we did, we took it to the ground level, all 87 counties. And what I'm doing, and you'll see it this week, we are taking all... The voting machines to court and we're gonna get them as product liabilities, defective products.
00:16:24
Speaker 4: Okay. These are supposed to put out.
00:16:26
Speaker 3: An election that is secure and to get a winner, okay?
00:16:30
Speaker 4: To get a winner, to secure election.
00:16:32
Speaker 3: If you had cars that all have bad brakes, you have a defective product. So I took these two lawsuits, I did it before in 2022 in Arizona. in Alabama, and I was going to do it in every state. It got thrown out on standing, and the lawyers were all sanctioned. Since then, this went to the US Supreme Court, and they said, no, you can question these machine companies, and you don't get sanctioned.
00:16:57
Speaker 4: You have every right to question them.
00:16:59
Speaker 2: I want to go back because we only have a few minutes.
00:17:01
Speaker 1: I really want to go back to the hand recount issue for a moment because the one thing that I can't square, we just got a few minutes, is that regardless of whether they wanted to do a full count of what you were saying, wanted to do a full recount of all of the different candidates in the governor's race, the state still offered you the chance to test exactly what we were talking about regarding a hand count, specifically of your ballots and DeMuth's checked against the electronic count, which would tell you something either way, wouldn't it? I mean, if the hand count for your ballots, the votes that you got, and the hand counts for DeMuth, what she got, matches the machines, then those results check out. If it doesn't, then now you've got a solid case that something's wrong. Either way, you get an answer that you can pursue. Why not take the test? What am I missing here?
00:18:02
Speaker 3: You're missing this. You need to have all the ballots. If you take a Mike Lindell ballot and the computer says it was whatever, Kendall Qualls, for example, Kendall, how am I gonna see that that ballot that was for Mike Lindell actually went to Kendall Qualls?
00:18:26
Speaker 4: You understand?
00:18:27
Speaker 3: So the reports that came out of all the machines and all the precincts, so you had this report, Kendall Qualls got 14 votes. And then you look at it and you know Kendall didn't get 14, Mike Lindell got those 14.
00:18:40
Speaker 4: That's why you need all the ballots.
00:18:43
Speaker 3: If you're counting a deck of cards and you have 52 cards, you wanna see if all the cards are there. You don't count 20 of them and say, it looks like they're all here. You have to have the other ballots, all the other ballots, because if any ballot, if the machine can tell you whatever it wants, if the machine says Mike Lindell only got 100 votes in this county, and then you look in that county And Kendall Qualls got 70, and Mike Lindell only got 30. But the machine said Mike Lindell got 100. There's your problem. You can't tell it by here's Lisa Demuth, here's Mike Lindell. The machine said this is what these two got. But you have to prove with the paper ballots that it's not true. So you need all 1.1 million ballots to see what those computers did and told the public. And they didn't give me that. And I offered, I said, I'll pay whatever you want. They doubled the price. This wasn't for one third. It was for every single county to count every ballot. And that's what Minnesota law says. And that's what I offered to do. They were worried about it.
00:19:48
Speaker 4: I know they were because it was.
00:19:50
Speaker 3: Been found out. What we're finding out right now is exactly what.
00:19:53
Speaker 4: I just said.
00:19:54
Speaker 3: Just one precinct, a down ticket, let's say it was Kendall, got 14 votes on the paper ballots. It was for Mike Lindell, not him. So that alone proves that we're coming out with all this stuff in our report as we sue these.
00:20:11
Speaker 4: Machine companies now as defective devices.
00:20:14
Speaker 2: So eventually I'll get what I want.
00:20:16
Speaker 4: And that's to get rid of these voting machines in our country.
00:20:19
Speaker 2: I'm out of time. 30 seconds, if you can, real quick.
00:20:23
Speaker 1: Would you fund hand recounts across the country if a county said we'd accept it for certain races? Is that a priority for you to look at doing hand recounts like that?
00:20:37
Speaker 3: You have to have full-hand recounts for that whole precinct, or you can't see.
00:20:42
Speaker 4: You're only going to count part of the ballots. You absolutely have to have that.
00:20:46
Speaker 3: And because what people do, what counties do, oh, if you're this close, if you're not this close, you don't get to do a recount. A lot of things are like that. They don't even offer you to pay for one. Minnesota does. I took up their offer, and they shut it down. What we need to do is melt down the voting machines and turn them into prison bars.
00:21:06
Speaker 2: All right, Mike Lindell, I got to leave it there. I'm sorry.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: I'm literally out of time getting the hook from our producer from A-Rod. I appreciate it. I'd love to talk with you more because there's so much more that we can dive into and discuss maybe in another forum or format. But I appreciate your time, Mike. Thanks for joining us here on KOA.
00:21:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you.
00:21:25
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:21:26
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. Jimmy and for Mandy, stay with us. I think it got a little combative and I didn't want it to get combative. I wanted to understand the whole point in terms of hand recounting and of paper ballots and really find out to an extent the sincerity there in terms of do you think that paper ballots should be recounted by hand when the opportunity presents itself. Just as an example, in the beginning of our discussion, I brought up Tina Peters and her opportunity to do a hand recount brought to her by Republican County Commissioner in Mesa when she was County Clerk in January 2021 to do a hand recount.
00:22:23
Speaker 2: Paid for by the county.
00:22:26
Speaker 1: And I kind of thought that early on, that would be a point of clear agreement that Mike Lindell and I could have that he would agree, yes, she should have taken the opportunity to do a hand recount, a full hand recount.
00:22:44
Speaker 2: And he didn't give that answer.
00:22:45
Speaker 1: So that was puzzling and then shifted gears and what have you. And we went into some of these other things and, you know, you only have 20 ish minutes for a conversation. And the opportunity in a conversation like that to keep it focused on specific things can be a challenge. And that was, that was the case there is I wanted to really discuss more into the recount and recount and stuff and, and not some of the other things.
00:23:18
Speaker 2: Issues that he had brought up.
00:23:20
Speaker 1: And certainly, the text line has been all abuzz during that conversation. And it's important to hear different voices and perspectives when you can challenge and talk about it and hash things out.
00:23:38
Speaker 2: Look, the reality of.
00:23:39
Speaker 1: The situation in Colorado is that We all get paper ballots. Now, you can critique the mail ballot system. You can critique getting the voter rolls in shape and all of those things. But the fact is that every voter receives a voter verified paper ballot and you fill it out and you return it either by mail or in a drop box or at a vote center. And when you go to a vote center and you request a new ballot, they'll give you a paper ballot. Those ballots are there, and they are required to be retained for something like 25, 26 months under state law. And you can go back and do a hand recount and pay for the hand recount if you want. But it's going to cost you more, but you can do it. You can do these reviews. We have a risk-limiting audit as well. I was on the Canvas board for.
00:24:43
Speaker 1: Republicans in Arapahoe County several years back on two occasions. And you have the risk limiting on it where all of the, there's a selection of ballots that are selected and randomly, and all the election judges there and so forth, they check that physical record, physical ballot, against the electronic record for that ballot as assigned by a barcode, basically, or the number that's printed on the ballot when it is scanned during the initial counting. And with the risk-limiting audit, you have a separate system. It's not the software that's used to tabulate the results. It's separate proprietary software to the state. And you can cross-check, okay, here's what the electronic count had.
00:25:47
Speaker 2: Here's the physical paper. I literally did this.
00:25:51
Speaker 1: With my Democrat cohort, counterpart rather. You look down at your ballot, the ballot in front of you, the paper ballot, you look at the screen, they check out, great, you mark it. We happened in one of those two elections to We happen to notice a discrepancy, a ballot that should not have been counted the way that it was counted during the election. But it was a human error in that it was flagged for adjudication for human review, went through the scanner, there was an issue, it was flagged for human review. The humans then had to look at the Secretary of State's guidebook, which is something that's been used for years and years. To be able to ascertain what did they mean? You can't not do that. You have to make a determination. What did this vote say? Because otherwise you got to throw it out and you can't just throw out a vote. And you don't know who it is because it's a secret ballot. So let's say it actually belongs to John Smith.
00:26:58
Speaker 2: You don't know that it's John Smith.
00:26:59
Speaker 1: So you can't go to John Smith and say, hey, did you mean to mark this candidate or that candidate? Yes or no on this ballot initiative. So you have to make a judgment. And they made the wrong judgment very clearly, made a mistake. And we said, look, there's a problem. This ballot's been counted wrong because of human error.
00:27:22
Speaker 2: And they were able to.
00:27:22
Speaker 1: Put that into that discrepancy and make note of that and what have you. no system's going to be perfect. And imagine if all ballots were hand counted, by the way, initially. This is why I like a hand recount when it's presented. And I think in Minnesota, they should have just said, yeah, let's do a hand recount of the entire governor's race.
00:27:44
Speaker 2: Like, just do it. For crying out loud.
00:27:51
Speaker 1: See if they'll play ball and actually allow the recount to go through. And the team that wants it If you allow everybody, will they actually do it?
00:28:00
Speaker 2: Because they didn't.
00:28:02
Speaker 1: Lindell's team didn't move forward with the recount because it didn't meet their specifications. But let's say it did. Then it's sort of a put up or shut up. You're going to actually let it go through? And it would have been really interesting to see. I think they should have done it regardless. Even if it's just Lindell and the other candidate, the top two, go ahead and do it. But the state should have pursued as well a full recount, why not, of the governor's race by hand to verify that the results were legit, especially if it's being paid for by Lindell. But to go back in Colorado, we have paper ballots and they get tabulated electronically. And human beings do that. Put them through the scanners, and they get tabulated, and they can be flagged for human review. And that may or may not change what that vote is counted as. Then the election's over. Then you have the risk-limiting audit that takes a statistical sample of ballots and cross-checks, does exactly what Lindell says he wants, which is to cross-check the physical paper ballots that with the electronic vote count for these ballots. It's not a full overhand recount, but it is still the physical paper ballot, the physical evidence checked against the electronic record that was counted for the results.
00:29:42
Speaker 2: And that's a pretty good system.
00:29:47
Speaker 1: And I would think that there should be common ground there in saying, okay, well, this is something we should be doing everywhere. I don't know that there's really common ground there. It depends on sincerity.
00:29:58
Speaker 2: Is this actually what you want?
00:30:03
Speaker 1: So it is a system that is imperfect as any system is, but at least you have some of those checks. And really, frankly, Tina Peters should have taken up Commissioner Cody Davis when he came to her and said, let's just do a recount just to make sure people are okay.
00:30:22
Speaker 2: You know, verify the results. And she said no. Why?
00:30:28
Speaker 1: Why haven't they moved forward with actual checks? hand recounts in these jurisdictions and what have you and paid for it with tens of millions of dollars out there.
