Mike Lindell offered five million dollars to anyone that could prove that the data he had was not from the 2020 election. He went on to say, the data proved China had helped to steal the election from Donald Trump. This is conspiracy theory slight of hand. It takes a little bit of specialized knowledge to figure out what he did, but someone did and he is in the process of getting the courts to award him the money. Just to make it interesting, the data security specialist that did it is a conservative.
Above is from the rules of the challenge. This was obtained by the Washington Post.
I'll pull some quotes from the Post article, but if you can get to it, here's the story
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/04/20/mike-lindell-prove-wrong-contest/
It really didn't take that much special knowledge. First, you had to go to the conference that Lindell put on to get the "kit" that he challenged anyone to review. Then, you need to understand what was in it.
The data he planned to reveal, he said, were “packet captures” that would demonstrate Chinese government interference. Packet captures, or “pcaps,” are a specific file format that is an industry standard for archiving internet traffic.
I know what those are, but I would have needed a little more knowledge to take the next step. When I first heard about someone winning this challenge, I wondered why it took as long as it did. The reason for that is probably the wording of the challenge. Most people who were there and understood it, probably noticed the slight of hand, and didn't even look at the data. Only one person went through the arbitration process.
All Lindell needed to do was put any random data from the 2020 election in there. Then it would be true that he had that data. No one could win the challenge, and he could have gone on to use that as proof that he is right about China's involvement.
This is how conspiracy theories work; Get someone to argue against you, claim something minor that is true, get them to say the minor claim is true, go back to saying your bigger claim is true and keep talking really fast, throwing in new claims and bad logic until everyone gives up even trying to argue with you. Anyone witnessing that who wants to believe your theory but doesn't want to do the work of thinking about it, is now on board.
That's when they'll tell you to "do your own research" even though they have not. The 4 hour video of Mike Lindell does not count as research, BTW. Or, they'll tell you not to listen to the experts, like the news or the courts or the government, while also claiming to be experts on the issue.
The contest winner, Robert Zeidman, calls himself a "moderate conservative" and voted for Trump twice. At the arbitration hearing where he was awarded the prize, he said,
Zeidman testified that he wanted the money and wanted to push back against stolen-election claims. “Mr. Lindell has a lot of followers,” Zeidman said. “He’s making a lot of statements to people that I know, people that are good friends of mine, people that are influential. And they are claiming that he has the data that shows that this election was stolen.”
What was in the data Lindell provided? A flowchart of how elections work, a list of IP addresses, and some other files that appeared to be random data. No packets, Chinese or otherwise. I can only imagine the series of conversations that led to this blunder. I imagine Lindell was advised on how to setup the challenge so he could not lose, but somewhere along the line, the advice was bad, or it was horribly executed. Having worked on a few computer projects in my life, I've seen what happens when managers think they know better than their technicians.
Lindell's response is in the record now, and it's the next step of the conspiracy theorist. He says he actually has the data, but he can't show it to you. It would put him in danger if he did. This is exactly what those who want to believe him want to hear, that he is the real victim, that there are forces out there that are trying take away our rights, and silence our voices, and even to kill us. And Mike knows who they are. But it's too dangerous for him to show you.
Lindell testified at arbitration that he did not share what he had described as his key data to support the foreign intrusion claim during the conference. He held off, he said, after a man seeking a selfie poked him in the side as the symposium was nearing an end — an act that Lindell called an assault and said he took as a signal the government might tamper with his central information if he made it public.
Lindell told the panel that, after the incident, his “red team” advisers warned him against making that information public. “They said it could be a poison pill put in the data and we really shouldn’t release the China stuff,” he said.
Regardless of his lose in this fight, Lindell will no doubt carry on as if he won. What will come next are claims that no one is addressing the China vote tampering, even when offered $5 million. Explaining how no one was ever offered that kind of money to address it, takes a few minutes. Time that most people don't take in this busy world of ten second video clips.
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