Since I Proved Mike Wrong

Do you know me? You might, and not even realize it. I meet people all the time, and when someone tells them who I am, they often say, “So you’re that guy! I know about you.”

I’m the guy who debunked the fake “proof” of voting machine hacking that has been presented on TV, online, and in courts around the country by Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow. If you watch conservative news, you know him as the rough-voiced, mustachioed gentleman who shows up in the strangest places to loudly sing the praises of his pillows along with all kinds of tempting discounts and special offers.

Shortly after the 2020 election, Lindell claimed to have discovered evidence that U.S. voting machines were hacked by China to throw the election from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Because so many people, particularly in the media, were skeptical, in the summer of 2021, he announced that he was going to hold a “Cyber Symposium” in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to release the data that supported his claims. He invited cyber experts from around the world and said he would even pay $5 million to anyone who could disprove his data.

I was one of those cyber experts. Specifically, I was the guy who attended that symposium, viewed the data, confirmed that it was not anything related to the 2020 election, submitted a report, and sued Lindell when he refused to acknowledge my work or pay me the money. I wasn’t the only one to come to this conclusion, but I was the only one to recognize that the data was simply pages and pages of typed gibberish that had been transformed into files of numbers that appeared to be very sophisticated. It’s like when that annoying guy orders a meal in French at a fancy restaurant to impress his date, but he’s still just ordering hamburger. While the other cyber experts at the symposium agreed that the data was bogus, I was also the only one to write up a detailed report, register it with the U.S. Copyright Office, and submit it on a flash drive to a member of Lindell’s “Red Team” that had allegedly reviewed and confirmed the data files.

The rules of the competition, which Lindell and his lawyer drew up, stated that his Red Team would evaluate every entry submitted to the “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” within two hours after the symposium ended and issue confirmation or denial of the prize. When weeks went by and I hadn’t heard anything, I hired the firm of Bailey and Glasser to represent me in the arbitration that was required by Lindell’s contest rules to resolve any disputes.

After more than a year, the case went to arbitration with three independent arbitrators, one chosen by me and two chosen by Lindell, who unanimously ruled in my favor. Mike Lindell owed me $5 million.

Since then, Lindell has produced “interviews” on his Frank Speech website where he stated that I was unqualified and should never have been invited in the first place. If you look me up, you’ll see that it would be difficult to find anyone more qualified than me, given that I invented the field of software forensics and have consulted on over 260 lawsuits and testified in 20 of them. These include, by the way, the cases of ConnectU v. Facebook (which was made into the Oscar-winning film The Social Network) and Oracle v. Google (which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court)

Lindell also claimed that the arbitrators were “liberals” who were out to get him. But remember that he chose two of the three. He also claimed that I’m a liberal who is out to discredit him. He’s partially right. You can search for my writings in national magazines and learn that I’m anything but a liberal. Not that it matters. But he is right that I’m out to discredit him because … well, because he’s wrong. Very wrong.

So now that I won, what next? Unfortunately, Lindell went through with his threat to challenge the award in court. He wrote the agreement that required binding arbitration, and he can only overturn the award if he can prove corruption in the arbitration process. He filed an appeal in federal court, and I will be appearing at a hearing soon in Minneapolis. My lawyers have filed a lawsuit to have this federal judge enforce the arbitration award so that I can end all this nonsense and collect. But Lindell will obviously continue to file appeals in an attempt to run out the clock. And what happens then? Probably he will declare bankruptcy as he has done in the past and, as he admits in his autobiography, was not always legitimate.

What I’ve done in the meantime is chronicled my adventure in a book titled Election Hacks. It is the personal story of how I investigated, discovered the truth, and made it “public by going up against a rich, powerful, influential businessman. It’s a technological mystery, a courtroom drama, and a character study of fanatics and their enablers. It’s about human nature and how people can so easily be led astray. It’s about how only Republicans can debunk Republican myths, so where are the Democrats to debunk Democrats’ myths? And it’s about standing up for the truth, even when that truth may turn out to belie your beliefs and alienate your friends.

Bob Zeidman is the creator of the field of software forensics and the founder of several successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms. He is the author of textbooks on engineering and intellectual property as well as award-winning screenplays and novels. His latest book is Election Hacks, which tells the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election.