Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate, has been inciting crowds by declaring he has proof of voting machine tampering that threw the 2020 election. As the inventor of the field of software forensics, I was invited by Lindell in 2021 to examine the alleged proof. What I found was bogus data, manipulated results, and dangerous conspiracy theories. This is the story of my successful $5 million lawsuit against Lindell and uncovering a scandal leading to top political leaders and advisors in America. Was the election stolen? Maybe. Maybe not. But Lindell’s bogus claims have prevented legitimate investigations.
Election Hacks is not just an important book about the cries of a stolen 2020 presidential election, it is also a warning for the 2024 election and all future elections. It’s a personal story of finding the truth and pursuing it by going up against a rich, powerful, influential businessman. It’s a technological mystery, a courtroom drama, and a character study of extremists and their enablers. It’s about human nature and how people can so easily be led astray. And it’s about standing up for the truth, even when that truth may turn out to belie your beliefs and alienate your friends.
Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate, has been inciting crowds by declaring he has proof of voting machine tampering that threw the 2020 election. As the inventor of the field of software forensics, I was invited by Lindell in 2021 to examine the alleged proof. What I found was bogus data, manipulated results, and dangerous conspiracy theories. This is the story of my successful $5 million lawsuit against Lindell and uncovering a scandal leading to top political leaders and advisors in America. Was the election stolen? Maybe. Maybe not. But Lindell’s bogus claims have prevented legitimate investigations.
Election Hacks is not just an important book about the cries of a stolen 2020 presidential election, it is also a warning for the 2024 election and all future elections. It’s a personal story of finding the truth and pursuing it by going up against a rich, powerful, influential businessman. It’s a technological mystery, a courtroom drama, and a character study of extremists and their enablers. It’s about human nature and how people can so easily be led astray. And it’s about standing up for the truth, even when that truth may turn out to belie your beliefs and alienate your friends.
I remember it being a little chilly on November 3, 2020 in Las Vegas. Maybe it wasn’t the actual temperature but rather my overall feeling about the election. And about events occurring around the country and the world. We had suffered through a global pandemic that had changed people’s lives literally overnight. My wife Carrie and I both worked out of our house, so it didn’t affect us as much as it did others. Our income had dropped significantly, but we had saved over the years. Plus the government loans had helped. It was difficult that we were covering two mortgages—one for the month-old purchase of our Las Vegas house and another for our unsold California house—but I had always been conservative in my spending as well as my politics, and I could afford to relax during the expected two weeks, then months, then more than a year that the pandemic was supposed to last.
The Black Lives Matter riots had scared us more than anything. We hadn’t felt so insecure and frightened since the Obama years, when the Occupy movements began and were tolerated by the administration, Democrat governors, and progressives around the world. When those Occupy movements came to Oakland and San Francisco, not far from our home in Cupertino, we went out and bought a handgun. We had both grown up in families that had been around guns—mine for legal uses, hers maybe not so much. Neither of us were particular fans of guns, though. In 2011, we became fans because California police were being told to stand down when confronted with rioters. And we lived in a large, isolated home in the hills of Cupertino among the high-tech wealthy.
We had moved to Las Vegas only a year and a half before the election to escape the crazy politics of California that had led to high taxes and high crime. We lived in a gated community in Summerlin, a quiet, attractive, middle-class, residential area about 15 miles northwest of The Strip. When BLM riots occurred just a mile or so away, our police stopped them immediately. But we decided to purchase a second handgun and later a shotgun. We found that our choices were limited, because the wait for a shotgun was weeks—each shotgun that came into a store went out the same day—and you had to travel around the city to find ammunition. A lot of people obviously felt the way we did.
On that election day, Carrie and I stood in line, masked of course, while some people handed out bottles of water. We made our way to the people checking our IDs and directing us to the voting machines. We both cast our ballots for Donald J. Trump for another term as President of the United States.
We didn’t like Trump as a person, and we were open about it. Before the 2016 election, I had written an article entitled, “Trump is an incompetent, sexist, thin-skinned, unethical bully... but I’m voting for him.” The long title was cut off in most links, so some progressive friends read only the first part and thanked me for writing it, obviously never having actually clicked on the link. The article was about how I disliked both Trump and Hillary Clinton. I had followed Trump’s business dealings for years, and even had a very minor involvement in one of them, and noted how most people in his deals got screwed, except for him who always somehow came out with a windfall gain. Carrie and I were fans of his TV show The Apprentice, but the appeal wasn’t his alleged business acumen but rather his mercurial temperament where he would fire anyone—not just contestants but also longtime employees—for saying anything that contradicted him. This was not the man I wanted to run our great country.
I didn’t like Trump and didn’t trust him, but I didn’t like or trust Hillary either. I believed, though, that the Republicans would keep an eye on Trump and keep him in line, or at least attempt to do so. Already, prominent Republicans were criticizing him during the campaign.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, always seemed to get a pass from a strongly united Democratic Party. Her shady dealings throughout her lifetime were always dismissed by her fellow Democrats. No matter what suspicious things she did—her scrubbing of government emails, the Whitewater scandal, the Clinton Foundation dealings, or her handling of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya resulting in the murder of four U.S. diplomats—the Democrats shielded her from criticism and deflected blame just as they did for Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Of the two candidates, Trump was the lesser of two evils. At the time, I knew Clinton’s political stances and hated them. I wasn’t sure of Trump’s, but they couldn’t be worse than Clinton’s.
By the year 2020, up until the COVID pandemic, I was certain Trump would win reelection. Despite his boorish personality and childish tweets, he had turned the country in a great direction. The economy was solid. Our foreign enemies feared us, and our allies appreciated us. Immigration was more controlled and lawful. Crime was down and employment was up. Things were looking good. You just had to ignore the mainstream press and the words coming out of Trump’s own mouth.
Then COVID hit. The lockdowns occurred. America needed a comforting father figure to reassure them. We needed Ronald Reagan. Or even Bill Clinton. Instead we got Donald Trump’s thin-skinned vitriol. Every insult, no matter how trivial from any insignificant source, drove him into a childish display of anger and tantrums. As always, I thought his policies were right (though I later came to decide that indiscriminate lockdowns and injections were very wrong, but we didn’t know better at the time), but his attitude was wrong.
The psychological frustration of the lockdown, fueled by the death of George Floyd, seemed to lead to widespread insanity. When the violent BLM riots began, every major Democratic politician not just accepted these violent uprisings but supported them. They not only backed defunding the police, but they even justified attacks on police. Progressive friends argued that Republicans not wearing masks were killing everyone in America and at the same time said that unmasked protesters, destroying billions of dollars of property and threatening innocent people, were standing up for social justice and against white supremacy. Critical race theory taught that whites were bad and blacks were perpetual victims. For decades, a man wearing a dress was considered at best a funny jokester or at worst a delusional person who needed help. Suddenly he was a member of a protected minority group. And children were being encouraged to have surgery and take drugs because the liberals who once promoted the idea that you should love yourself as you are, suddenly did a 180 degree turn to promote hating who you are and changing it through irreversible surgery and drugs. The world had gone nuts.
When the dust had cleared at the Democratic primaries, I couldn’t believe the result. The least competent person had somehow survived. Joe Biden was considered a joke by most serious political pundits, even those on the left. He was a known plagiarist and liar, his political views were too moderate for the extreme leftists who had so much influence on the modern Democratic Party. He was an “old white man,” the very kind of person that even moderate Democrats had been railing against. And he had obvious moments of mental incoherency during his campaign.
After his nomination, he stayed at home, rarely giving public rallies. When he did, they were sparsely attended. His few media interviews were done remotely, under the pretext of COVID, but obviously done to limit his tendency to ramble incoherently, as came out when some of his handlers’ remarks and notes got caught on camera.
Through all this insanity, I thought that America would once again vote for Donald Trump. He was an imperfect person—very much so—but he got good things done. And the Democrats had gone off the deep end, as made clear by their incompetent presidential candidate who had already badly lost two previous bids for president.
Nevada was clearly going for Trump. In the restaurants, in the casinos, and even in my synagogue, when mention of the election came up, Trump was almost always the preferred candidate. I took a Lyft ride from the airport, and the driver asked me who I was voting for, something that I would religiously avoid in California where non-progressive views were the subject of ridicule at best and violence at worst. But here in Nevada, I felt comfortable voicing my opinions. I told him Trump, and he said Trump was going to win overwhelmingly. I asked him how he knew. He said he had maybe a dozen riders a day from all walks of life. He asked everyone that question for months, and almost all of them said Trump.
So on that election day, Carrie and I were, as they say, “cautiously optimistic.” Carrie had volunteered at a Trump rally that February where he filled the Las Vegas Convention Center with thousands of supporters, and there were still lines to get in. People enthusiastically interrupted Trump every few minutes with applause and cheering.
On that chilly day in November, I felt confident that Nevada would go red, but wasn’t sure about the rest of the country. As the results came in from around the country later that day, it looked like another four years to make America great again. But I had a bad feeling when I went to bed, a premonition I guess, and when I woke up early, my premonition had been right. Major states had switched from overwhelming Trump majorities to thin Biden majorities. When the ballots were counted and certified some days later, I felt sick to find that Biden had even won Nevada.
On January 6, a rally of Trump supporters outside the U.S. Capitol Building turned dangerous when the people entered the building, chanting, rummaging, breaking, and stealing. Four Trump supporters died that day. Five police officers died shortly afterwards. Trump delayed sending out a message to calm the crowd, instead insisting that Vice President Mike Pence not certify the vote, something he couldn’t constitutionally do. We can argue about what happened that day and who was responsible, but I hope we agree it was a tragic and probably preventable event. I had been invited by my friends to attend that rally to protest the election, but I sensed that it wasn’t going to turn out well, so I declined. It just seemed like a bad idea and a potentially dangerous situation.
On January 20, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. Donald Trump didn’t attend, the first outgoing president not to attend the swearing in of his successor in over a century. Trump had insisted the election had been stolen from him. There are many people in this country who believe the same thing, and you’ll meet some of the most ardent ones in this story.
Rumors of cheating and fraud abounded among my Republican friends. As a software forensics expert, I got calls and emails from many friends, begging me to get involved. They wanted me to inspect the voting machines. So I contacted all of my friends and acquaintances in Republican politics, including some who had been advisors to Trump, and volunteered my services and that of my experienced team. None got back to me. I told my friends that I was sure they had already selected a team of top-notch software forensics and cybersecurity experts, ready immediately to perform the inspections. While my team and I are, in my opinion and that of many others, the best in the world at examining electronics and software, there are many others who can also do a competent job. I assumed they had contracted one of those other teams. Boy was I wrong.
REVIEW: Election Hacks by Bob Zeidman
Bob Zeidman is a good writer. His style, syntax, structure, and narrator’s voice are all outstanding. He is an excellent story-teller, and this is stylistically a very well-written book. He explains new concepts expertly, and creates a clear and comprehensive timeline of the events in the book.
But …
I am not American, so I was a little taken aback by the aggressively partisan views expressed in the first and final chapters of Election Hacks. Because they were so strident, I’m going to focus primarily on chapters two through thirty-eight — which were great, by the way — for my review.
In 2021 Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy and 2020 election outcome denier, claimed to have irrefutable electronic proof that the election was fraudulently won by Joe Biden, in part because voting machines across the country had been hacked by China, Russia, the Deep State, the Far Left — your choice. He claimed to have the electronic equivalent of a smoking gun. In fact, he was so sure of his data, that he offered a five million dollar reward to anyone who could disprove this claim.
Enter our hero, Bob Zeidman. Initially reluctant to participate in the challenge, he finally agreed to attend a conference that Mike Lindell had organized where he (Lindell) agreed to release the corroborating data to cybersecurity experts, a field Zeidman excels in. Throughout a three day symposium, Zeidman and his fellow cyber experts combed the data they were given. Ultimately, they were unable to verify the data, and Zeidman believed that he had proved the fraud, and was entitled to the five million dollar prize money. Lindell did not agree. And, legal proceedings ensued.
Zeidman’s methodical and detailed explanations of these proceedings allowed me to easily follow the case, and to understand the legal realties of suing someone for big bucks. I finished the book with an appreciation of how difficult it is to prove what appears to be an open-and-shut case. Along the way, we also get to know the person Bob Zeidman is, and what makes him tick, intellectually, morally, emotionally, and politically. And there lies the rub. I was taken aback by the extreme partisan rhetoric, and questionable proof used for some of the claims he makes. But, that was only in the first and last chapters, so …
Anyone who was interested in American politics will like this book. Regardless of your political slant, Election Hacks is still a good book, and well worth your time.