Mike Lindell's crusade to ban voting machines might have a California foothold: report

MyPillow CEO and 2020 election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell is on a crusade to stop U.S. elections to ban electronic voting and return to hand-counted paper ballots, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Lindell announced his effort this week at CPAC, saying that he wants to show "we have a very broken system and we better fix it."

“It’s just about the machines, about getting rid of the computers, so we have elections we can trust. Whoever wins, wins," Lindell said.

One California county known as a hotbed for political extremism may take up Lindell's crusade.

From the LA Times: "Shasta County, newly run by a majority of hard-right elected officials, this week formalized its plans to dump the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems, one of the largest suppliers of voting machines and software in the U.S., over fears that the machines could be or had been hacked by nefarious actors, maybe Democrats, maybe the Chinese government. Who knows?"

Speaking to the LA Times, UCLA professor and election law expert Richard L. Hasen said that hand counting "is less accurate because humans make more mistakes than machines."

According to Kilgore, voter fraud conspiracy theories are increasingly becoming normalized and even more dangerous because now they're coming from local community leaders.

"It definitely gives more credence [to conspiracies] if your county officials believe the theories to the point of making decisions,” conspiracy theory researcher Kathryn Olmsted told the LA Times. “It’s truly frightening that they’re making these major decisions without doing due diligence with the fact-checking, that they are making these decisions about elections based on these unsubstantiated conspiracy theories."

Read the full report at the LA Times.