The Minnesota Supreme Court on Saturday denied Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Lindell’s petition for a recount of all 1.1 million ballots in this month’s primary election after he missed a deadline to pay the state.
Lindell, founder of MyPillow and an ally of President Donald Trump, lost the Aug. 11 GOP primary to House Speaker Lisa Demuth by over 45,000 votes and claimed “anomalies” in the results without providing any concrete evidence of errors that would have changed the outcome.
Since he lost by around 11 percentage points, the state required Lindell to pay for the recount. The Minnesota Secretary of State estimated it would cost around $825,000. Minnesota law requires a 0.25% margin for a publicly funded recount.
Under a contingent plan from Aug. 18, only votes for Lindell and Demuth would be counted by name. The rest would fall into their own general category. The recount would apply only to the GOP governor’s race and wouldn’t include ballots cast in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary.
Lindell signaled he was prepared to wire the money but withheld the payment just hours before the Aug. 24 midnight deadline after objecting to recount terms set by the state. In a petition to the state supreme court, he argued state rules required a recount of every ballot.
Justices ruled election officials were “not committing any wrongful act, omission, or error” because they were following procedures set in Minnesota election law.
Since the recount plan from the Canvassing Board and Secretary of State would determine “the number of votes validly cast for the office,” Lindell’s petition failed on its own merits, they wrote.
“Lindell’s focus on alleged anomalies confuses the purpose of a manual recount with an election
Contest,” the court said in a ruling signed by Chief Justice Natalie Hudson. “In other words, after all votes are sorted and counted, Lindell would know whether he is the winner over Demuth.”
Despite the loss at the state Supreme Court, Lindell on Saturday said he was prepared to continue his fight for a full recount. There is one ballot in the Minnesota Primary election, though voters must choose one party. But Lindell argued his name’s appearance on the ballot requires a full recount under state law.
“My name was on 1,100,000 ballots that went through those machines,” he said. “And the only way to validate that is to have a paper hand-counted paper ballot audit of the whole election, which was 1.1 million ballots.”
Lindell said he’d attempt to take the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, though it’s unclear if a case related to state election law would fall under federal jurisdiction.
Lindell has faced legal action from voting machine makers for claiming their equipment was manipulated to affect the results of the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Democratic President Joe Biden.
In Minnesota’s gubernatorial race, Democratic primary voters picked U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar as their nominee to advance to the November general election, where Minnesotans will pick Democratic-Farmer-Labor Gov. Tim Walz’s successor.
Klobuchar handily won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary with no major competitors.