BOISE, Idaho — The Idaho Secretary of State's Office is once again refuting claims of election fraud leveled by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and CEO, this time regarding the 2022 Idaho Primary election.
Lindell claims Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, who received 32% of the vote in the Republican gubernatorial primary, actually defeated Gov. Brad Little, who received 53% of the vote. McGeachin received the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, who Lindell claims had the 2020 presidential election stolen from him.
In a video segment shared on social media, Lindell says he has evidence "piled all the way to the sun and back" of election fraud in Idaho and elsewhere. He does not say what the evidence is. As a defense against those who would debunk his claims, Lindell says no judge has looked at or ruled on his evidence, and he says he'll present details at an event in August that he's calling the "Moment of Truth Summit."
"We are not letting this sit idly by," Lindell said. "These (voting) machines will be melted down and used for prison bars, and Idaho's at the front of the line as far as I'm concerned."
Idaho Chief Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck said he has seen the clip circulating on social media and, as far as he knows, Lindell's claims are baseless. In a phone call with KTVB reporter Andrew Baertlein, Houck added that Lindell has not presented any evidence to the state of Idaho regarding inaccuracies in the 2022 GOP primary election. Houck also said an audit completed in late May, after the primary, found no evidence of any significant errors that could have impacted the outcome of the election.
Lindell also claimed electronic vote tampering occurred in every Idaho county during the 2020 presidential election, an election in which Trump carried the state by a wide margin. When Idaho state officials investigated those Lindell claims, Houck said, "once we had the document in hand, we immediately believed there was something amiss." Specifically, at least seven Idaho counties have no electronic steps in their vote-counting processes.
Idaho does not use the voting machines that have been the focus of unsubstantiated claims of fraud that followed the 2020 election. Every vote is recorded on paper; voters either write an "X" on a hand-counted paper ballot or fill in bubbles on an optical-scan sheet, similar to what has, for decades, been used for many multiple-choice tests in high schools and colleges across the country.
In early 2022, following the state's investigation of Lindell's 2020 claims, Idaho Secretary of State Lawerence Denney and Attorney General Lawrence Wasden sent Lindell a bill for $6,000 and a cease-and-desist letter demanding he remove all false statements about Idaho's elections from his website and to "refrain from making similar statements in the future."
Lindell did not ever respond directly to the letter, Idaho Attorney General's Office public information officer Scott Graf said. The AG's office is aware of Lindell's recent video, but does not have any comment about it at this time.
Watch more Idaho politics:
See all of our latest political coverage in our YouTube playlist: