Lindell offers to fund Minnesota GOP recount after primary loss

Minnesota pegs full recount cost at $825,000

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and a Trump ally, offered Wednesday to personally fund a recount and audit of every paper ballot cast in Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary, a race he lost to state House Speaker Lisa Demuth in the August 11 vote.

Lindell, who finished a distant second to Demuth by roughly 11 percentage points, cited a Minnesota law he said gives candidates the right to seek a complete hand count even when the margin falls well outside the range that would require a state-funded recount.

“One of the few good election laws Minnesota does have is that as a candidate, I have the right to completely audit and hand-count every ballot in the state,” Lindell said in a press release, adding that he intends to use that right “to the full extent of the law.”

Because the gap between the candidates is wider than the 0.25% threshold that would trigger an automatic state-funded recount, Lindell would need to formally request the recount and cover its cost himself. Minnesota Secretary of State general counsel Lauren Bethke estimated in a Tuesday letter to Lindell that a full recount of the governor and lieutenant governor races would cost roughly $825,000, according to CBS News. The letter reportedly gives him until Monday, August 24, to get both the request and payment to the secretary of state’s office.

Lindell’s campaign alleged “irregularities identified in election-night electronic reporting data” in its news release announcing the recount offer.

The announcement follows Lindell’s refusal last week to concede the primary despite trailing by a double-digit margin. The Associated Press called the race for Demuth, the Minnesota House speaker, late on election night.

Lindell has spent years making claims about the integrity of U.S. elections. He built his political career around the claim that Trump’s 2020 defeat resulted from a rigged and stolen election and has said he spent tens of millions of dollars pursuing that claim through lawsuits, documentaries and conferences. Courts repeatedly rejected those claims. Last month, Lindell settled a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit filed by voting technology company Liberty Vote, formerly known as Dominion Voting Systems, over the stolen-election claims.

MSI previously reported that Lindell refused to concede the Minnesota GOP governor primary the morning after polls closed. His offer Wednesday to personally fund a hand recount of every ballot in the state’s primary is the next step in that challenge.