Mike Lindell claims to have a new tool for uncovering election fraud – but it seems just as likely to provoke violent threats as discover evidence of a crime.
The MyPillow CEO has been promoting a gizmo called a "Wireless Monitoring Device" – which shares an unfortunate acronym with "weapons of mass destruction" – that he claims will turn up proof that election machines or other devices were connected to wireless internet, exclusively reported Steven Rosenfeld for Raw Story.
"I told Lindell that his WMD alerts would be going off everywhere because many states use online connections for e-pollbooks — which are often i-Pads – to make sure only registered voters get a ballot," reported Rosenfeld, a senior writing fellow for the non-profit organization Voting Booth.
"In addition, almost every voting site has printers in case a voter needs a new ballot. In other words, his system would be flagging routine polling station operations as possible cyber-attacks."
"He didn’t care," Rosenfeld added.
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Lindell hopes to ditch voting machines entirely, plunging U.S. elections back to the late 1800s, when voting machines were invented to help prevent ballot-stuffing. But his methods may put election officials at risk from rabid partisans who don't understand how voting administration actually works.
"There is a method to Lindell’s mayhem, which is both relentless and accepted as bedrock truth by a subset of Trump’s most ardent and impressionable supporters," Rosenfeld wrote. "With this comes a real danger of inciting more threats to elections officials, distrust of elections, generally, and civil strife. Come 2024, thousands of like-minded local activists may be receiving deeply misinformed messages — via Lindell’s social media network that their local polls and county election headquarters might be under an active cyber-attack."
Lindell plans to test at least 1,000 WMDs in three states where senior election officials are Republicans -- Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi -- for November's down-ballot races, but he says pushback from GOP officials would only prove they were on the take with Democrats who oppose Donald Trump.
"That answer allowed me to raise my top concern: whether his machine might provoke violence," Rosenfeld said. "I asked if he was worried that his app alerts might prompt some people 'to get upset and go charging down to county headquarters and start banging on doors' — which happened in 2020, and was a prelude to threats by some Trump supporters to elections officials across the country."
But Lindell wasn't concerned, saying his allies were only concerned with getting rid of electronic voting machines and not interested in more direct action -- but Rosenfeld was dubious.
"In some states, officials may not be allowed to use federally uncertified equipment at voting sites and inside county headquarters," Rosenfeld wrote. "His app that tracks allegedly illegal voters could spawn vigilante squads that violate federal civil rights laws barring voter intimidation. His WMD alarm could test new post-2020 laws that criminalize any harassment or threats to election officials."
"And nobody can say if an emotional and enraged partisan will be provoked by a false claim of a cyber-attack and angrily head to a poll or their county headquarters," he added.
