MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on Wednesday announced plans to pay for a private recount after losing the Minnesota Republican governor primary to House Speaker Lisa Demuth by 45,000 votes.
Lindell is seeking a statewide recount and audit of every ballot cast in the GOP primary. Around 414,000 voters took part in the Republican contest for governor.
The Minnesota Secretary of State estimates the recount will cost more than $825,000.
Demuth had more than 43% of the vote to Lindell’s more than 32%. GOP-endorsed Kendall Qualls had 21% of the vote, with the remaining votes shared by four other candidates.
While publicly funded voter recounts for governor’s races in Minnesota require the difference in votes between a winning and losing candidate to be less than one-quarter of a percent, or 0.25%, a candidate can personally finance what is known as a discretionary 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, and I am going to exercise that right to full extent of the law,” Lindell said in a news release on his plan.
So once the results show that Demuth did indeed win the primary handily, what does Lindell do then? Does he continue to cling to a fantasy that the election was stolen from him, thus causing his supporters to distrust Minnesota's election system, resulting in depressing overall Republican turnout for the November general? That was the strategy of his pal Donald Trump in Georgia back in January of 2021, an exercise which cost the GOP a majority in the U.S. Senate.
If Lindell's reaction to this recount (which will ultimately confirm his resounding defeat) is anything other than congratulating Demuth on her victory, it validates my belief that his main addiction has transitioned from crack to delusional attention whore.
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