Mike Lindell spurs new headache for Idaho election officials: Obscure records requests

BOISE (Idaho Statesman) — On Aug. 21, Idaho election offices received public records requests for an unusual set of voting data, known as a cast vote record.

Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane, a 17-year election administrator, said he and other county officials hadn’t heard of a cast vote record — an electronic record of votes captured by ballot-counting machines — before the 2020 election.

“We didn’t even know what a cast record was; we certainly didn’t generate it,” McGrane told the Idaho Statesman by phone.

Over the next two weeks, county clerks in Ada and Canyon counties received more requests for copies of cast vote records. The source of the strange trend: Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, who has peddled false theories that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump due to fraudulent programming in ballot-counting machines.

Election officials across the country were inundated with requests for the ballot-counting data after Aug. 20, when Lindell urged his followers to seek out the records during his “Moment of Truth” summit in Springfield, Missouri.

Idaho’s voting machines didn’t generate cast vote records in 2020, nor would the data show evidence of widespread fraud in that election. An audit of paper ballots compared to machine counting in the 2020 election found a 0.1% margin of error.

LINDELL’S ‘TRIAL OF THE MACHINES’

Lindell in August hosted a weekend-long summit — the second in as many years — to publicize his theories about election fraud. Lindell streamed the event, and solicited donations, on his social media website Frank Speech.

During a workshop titled “Trial of the Machines,” Lindell said that cast vote records would show that ballot-counting machines manipulated election results in 2020. He urged “cyber guys” to retrieve the records from their local election offices, search for clues of inconsistencies and publicize them.

“Tell the world,” Lindell said. “Put it up on your Facebook. Brag about it.”

Records obtained by the Statesman showed 15 people requested the 2020 cast vote record from Ada County between Aug. 21 and Sept. 3. During the same period, 11 different people requested the cast vote record from Canyon County.

Many of the requests were identical, asking for a cast vote record along with more than a dozen other data fields, such as voting precincts and ballot types.

“Pursuant to our state’s freedom of information law, please remit the Cast Vote Records from the 2020 General Election,” one boilerplate request started.

Another said that Ada County would have “very likely” already created a cast vote record while auditing its election results. But, if the records custodian was unfamiliar with how to generate the report, they could refer to an elections software guide, the request noted.

The Statesman tried to contact seven people who requested a cast vote record from Ada County and was able to reach one. He declined to comment.

THE FACTS ON CAST VOTE RECORDS

Jeff O’Donnell, a computer systems professional working with Lindell, said election officials may have the data they seek under a different name than cast vote record. Lindell accused the Idaho secretary of state of hiding the information.

Idaho’s ballot-counting machines didn’t generate cast vote records during the 2020 election, Idaho Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck said. For some ballot-counting machine vendors in Idaho, it’s not even an option to create the record, he said by phone.

In response to the high volume of records requests prompted by Lindell, Ada County has updated its machines to create cast vote records in the upcoming election, McGrane said.

Other counties “find themselves having to actually upgrade software in order to get a version that would allow them to capture a cast vote record,” which isn’t required by Idaho or federal law, Houck said. “So, in many cases, you’re going to see counties choose not to make that upgrade because that’s the only feature they gain. Why would they spend taxpayer dollars for it?”

Colorado uses cast vote records to serialize ballots, which helps limit risk in auditing, Houck said. Idaho uses paper ballots to verify machine counts.

“We don’t do it like Colorado does, we don’t do it like Washington does,” Houck said. “Most of the conspiracy theories out there assign a single process to every state, universally, as a blanket, and then infer that everybody does things the same.”

Two voting machine manufacturers, Dominion and Smartmatic, have sued Lindell, alleging defamation for spreading conspiracy theories that their machines are rigged.

MYPILLOW CEO’S IDAHO CLAIMS ALREADY DEBUNKED

It’s not the first time Lindell’s false voter fraud claims have forced Idaho election officials to do extra work.

In January, Idaho Secretary of State Lawerence Denney and Attorney General Lawrence Wasden sent a cease-and-desist letter to Lindell, demanding that he “promptly remove all false statements about Idaho’s elections” from his website and “refrain from making similar statements in the future.”

Lindell has no intention of correcting his claim. Trump won Idaho by more than 267,000 votes, but Lindell believes the true number was much higher.

“I will never stop,” he told the Statesman. “I want to save our country.”

Lindell claims that in Idaho more than 35,000 Trump votes were incorrectly counted for Biden. In response, Idaho’s secretary of state conducted an audit of three counties’ paper ballots and found a 0.1% margin of error. Along with the cease and desist, Idaho sent Lindell a $6,500 bill for the taxpayer money it spent refuting his claim.

Meanwhile, nearly one in three Idaho adults believes the conspiracy theory that widespread voter fraud took place in the 2020 U.S. election and Trump won, according to new poll results commissioned by the Statesman.

Election offices in Montana, Arizona, Missouri and other states received similar requests for cast vote records this summer, local news outlets have reported. Election officials in nearly two dozen states have fielded “an unprecedented wave” of records requests, forcing local officials to spend days meeting the demand while they tried to prepare for the midterm election, The Washington Post reported.

Compared to other states, McGrane said, Ada County hasn’t seen the same high volume of requests for the cast vote record, but the requests require the expertise of a high-ranking election official.

“This stuff takes technical knowledge to determine what it even is,” McGrane said. “One of the burdens has been just trying to do the legal research or technical research to make sure we’re handling the requests properly.”

People requesting the cast vote record in Idaho are not going to find evidence of ballot manipulation, McGrane said. Ada County had a “perfect match” when its 2022 primary election results were audited, McGrane said.

A hand count confirmed the machines’ results.