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- Mike Lindell continues to spread baseless claims that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.
- The MyPillow CEO is offering a $5 million bounty to anyone who can prove he’s wrong.
- The catch: you have to attend his upcoming cyber symposium conference in South Dakota.
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MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump and leading promoter of voter fraud conspiracy theories, said he’d give $5 million to anyone who can disprove data that he claims shows election interference.
But there’s a catch. To be eligible, you have to attend his upcoming cyber symposium conference, which is taking place in South Dakota between August 10 and 12.
And the event isn’t open to the public, according to an advert for the event posted on Lindell’s website Frank. Invitees include current politicians, cyber experts, and the media, though it will also be streamed for 72 hours on Frank.
Lindell said he wants the symposium to be the most-watched live event in history, and is aiming for 1 billion people to watch it via his website, Salon’s Zachary Petrizzo reported. He has reserved 800 rooms for the event, but few officials have said they will attend.
There is nothing to suggest Lindell’s event will draw anywhere close to those numbers. For context, the most-watched Super Bowl ever drew in around 114 million viewers, and the first 2020 presidential debate had a total of 73 million viewers.
At the event, “Mike will reveal the cyber data and the packet captures from the November 2020 election,” the advert says. “A $5,000,000 prize will be offered to any attendee who can prove that this cyber data is not valid data from the November 2020 election.”
Lindell told Steve Bannon on Monday that he has 37 terabytes of information related to voter fraud, Salon reported.
Kevin Skoglund, president and chief technologist of Citizens for Better Elections, told The Dispatch that Lindell’s data theory is “technically incoherent and wrong in several ways.” According to Skoglund, Lindell claims that his team of anonymous experts collected internet traffic from foreign computers that infiltrated US voting systems.
“An extraordinary claim needs extraordinary evidence,” Skoglund said to The Dispatch. “And they provide little evidence at all.”
Lindell, who said in April that he still spoke to Trump around once a month, has repeatedly supported the former president’s debunked claims challenging the integrity of the 2020 election.
This has led to Lindell being blocked from Twitter and sued by vote-machine company Dominion for $1.3 billion for claiming that it “switched” votes from Trump to Biden. MyPillow’s products have also been pulled by retailers and Lindell said he’d received death threats, too.
Discussing the media, Lindell said: “I’ve invited them all to the symposium. Why don’t you prove it there so then you can win $5 million?”
This isn’t the first time Lindell has held an event to spout his voter-fraud theories.
He also held a so-called “Frank Rally” at the Corn Palace in South Dakota in May to celebrate the launch of the site, which features videos and articles, many by right-wing conspiracy theorists, that largely focus on voter fraud.
-SDPB News (@SDPBNews) May 10, 2021
The venue for the Frank Rally could fit around 3,000 attendees – but pictures circulating on Twitter showed that it was only half full.
The rally featured talks from Ben Carson, Trump’s secretary of housing and urban development, and conservative podcaster Eric Metaxas, as well as Lindell himself, who spread voter-fraud theories including an inflated estimate of Trump’s vote total in the 2020 presidential election.
Attendees received a free copy of both Lindell’s autobiography and his self-made voter-fraud film “Absolute Proof.”
Lindell also spoke at the ReAwaken America tour last week, where he claimed that Trump received 80 million votes in the 2020 election and Biden 68 million, though he failed to provide any evidence to back up his claims.
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