Former Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Lindell says he is taking legal action after the Minnesota Secretary of State changed the terms of a recount Lindell is pursuing related to his bid for governor of Minnesota.
Earlier this month, Lindell lost the Republican primary for Minnesota governor by 11 points to Lisa Demuth. After that loss, Lindell said he would seek a recount of the GOP primary for governor, claiming “anomalies” were present in the election-night reporting data.
Lindell’s camp has said those “anomalies” included “unusual synchronized vote totals across all seven Republican candidates,” vote totals moving backwards during the election-night reporting, and “counties reporting more votes than cast.”
Given the wide margin of Lindell’s loss to Demuth, state law required Lindell to pay for the recount himself and submit payment for that recount by Monday.
On Monday evening, Lindell issued a press release saying a wire transfer of $825,000 was ready to be transferred to fund the recount, but “the Minnesota Secretary of State, at the last minute, changed the scope of the recount in violation of Minnesota law.”
According to Lindell’s team, the secretary of state told Lindell that the recount would be limited to only recounting votes for Lindell and Demuth instead of all the candidates in the Republican primary for governor.
Lindell’s team contends that such a limited recount is a violation of Minnesota Statutes 204C.35, Subdivision 3, which says a recount “is limited in scope to the determination of the number of votes validly cast for the office or question to be recounted.”
A press release from Lindell accused the secretary of state of attempting a “bait and switch” and claimed the “anomalies” in election night reporting applied to all candidates, not just Lindell and Demuth.
That press release also said Lindell is in “an untenable position” in which he either pays for an unlawful recount that would not “address” the anomalies identified by his team, or he fights to obtain a “lawful” recount and misses the Monday deadline for payment.
“Lindell has asked the state to waive the statutory payment deadline until a court can rule on the parameters of the recount proposed by the Secretary of State,” the press release said. “In order to address this issue, the campaign is now taking immediate legal action.”
That legal action, which was filed Monday, asks the Minnesota Supreme Court to force the secretary of state to “conduct a full recount of all ballots cast for the office of Governor.”
Earlier this month, the Minnesota Secretary of State put together a contingency plan which outlined how the office would handle a recount requested by a candidate who ran in the state’s Aug. 11 primary election.
A copy of that plan, dated Aug. 18, says a potential recount is “limited in scope to the determination of the number of votes cast for the candidates to be recounted,” which appears to conflict with the recount process outlined in the state law Lindell cited.
Alpha News contacted the Minnesota Secretary of state for his story. However, the office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Luke Sprinkel
Luke Sprinkel previously worked as a Legislative Assistant at the Minnesota House of Representatives. He grew up as a Missionary Kid (MK) living in England, Thailand, Tanzania, and the Middle East. Luke graduated from Regent University in 2018.
