MyPillow Founder Will Not Pay Winnings for Election Challenge, Court Rules

A federal appeals court has ruled that Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, does not have to pay out $5 million to a software developer who had entered a challenge held by Mr. Lindell inviting skeptics to disprove his claims of interference in the 2020 presidential election.

An arbitration panel had previously ordered Mr. Lindell to pay the $5 million to Robert Zeidman, a software developer who entered Mr. Lindell’s “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge, which offered a $5 million reward to anyone who could debunk what Mr. Lindell called evidence of Chinese interference in the 2020 election.

The ruling, issued by an appeals court in Minnesota on Wednesday, signals the end of a yearslong back and forth between Mr. Lindell and Mr. Zeidman, whose battle over the Challenge reward grafts directly from Mr. Lindell’s yearslong, baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump.

“It’s a great day for our country,” Mr. Lindell said in an interview.

Mr. Lindell had just landed in Washington, D.C., he said, and was headed to the White House.

Mr. Lindell had hosted a symposium in South Dakota in 2021 during which he presented what he said was widespread, software-based data showing interference in the 2020 presidential election. As part of the presentation, Mr. Lindell invited skeptics to join the “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge, wherein if they were able to debunk Mr. Lindell’s claims, they would win $5 million.

According to federal court documents, Mr. Zeidman joined the competition and submitted a 15-page packet that internal competition judges said did not adequately disprove Mr. Lindell’s data. Mr. Zeidman challenged the result, and later took his case to federal court, where arbitration judges found Mr. Zeidman’s packet had “unequivocally” proven Mr. Lindell’s data was not related to the November 2020 election.

Mr. Zeidman, who has identified himself to The New York Times previously as a Republican who voted twice for Mr. Trump, has said that he believed Mr. Lindell’s claims were harmful to democracy.

“A false narrative about election fraud is just really damaging to this country,” Mr. Zeidman said at the time.

The crux of Mr. Zeidman’s evidence was that Mr. Lindell’s supposed proof of election interference did not include voting machines’ packet capture data, which refers to a unique signature on original data that is transferred from a specific place and time.

However, in a ruling published on Wednesday, a panel of federal appeals judges found that, because Mr. Lindell’s rules for the Challenge were written broadly, the evidence Mr. Zeidman presented debunking Mr. Lindell’s claims was not unequivocal.

“From the four corners of the Challenge contract as defined by the Official Rules, there is no way to read ‘information related to the November 2020 election’ as meaning only information that is packet capture data,” the ruling said.

In a separate case decided earlier this year, a federal jury found that Mr. Lindell had defamed a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems, accusing the man of helping to rig votes against Mr. Trump in the 2020 election. He called the man “a traitor to the United States.”

Mr. Lindell was ordered to pay the man, Eric Coomer, $2.3 million in damages, a verdict Mr. Lindell has said he intends to appeal.

Ali Watkins covers international news for The Times and is based in Belfast.

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