The CEO of MyPillow was treated like a visiting dignitary in Alabama Friday, meeting with the state’s governor and secretary of state during the latest stop on his futile months-long effort to demonstrate hijinks in the 2020 election.
MyPillow honcho Mike Lindell “was very impressed by our efforts and said that Alabama had the best election system and the safest procedures he had seen in America!” the state’s top elections official, Secretary of State John Merrill, wrote on Facebook after the meeting, attaching pictures showing Lindell and his team presenting a graph on a laptop. “We look forward to our next meeting!”
The pillow magnate later claimed without any basis that despite Alabama’s best efforts, 100,000 votes had been “flipped” in the state during the 2020 election. Lindell, who has spent months and millions of dollars pushing false claims of voter fraud in the last election, also purchased a copy of Alabama’s voter rolls and plans to perform “tests” on the data, Al.com reported.
Photos from the meeting show that Lindell was accompanied by Douglas Frank, the former math and science department chair at a Cincinnati high school whose viral, smoke–and–mirrors claims about the 2020 election have made him a minor celebrity in the election truther world.
“Today, Mr. Mike Lindell of My Pillow, Inc. visited the Secretary of State’s Office. Our team discussed several topics that were of concern to Mr. Lindell and other citizens,” a press release from Merrill’s (R) office said.
“Even though Mr. Lindell indicated that Alabama has the best elections system he has seen and that our state has the safest election procedures of all of the 50 states, he still has some questions he would like to have answered. We will be looking forward to his next visit in our state.”
That’s putting things lightly: Speaking on his show “The Lindell Report” after the visit, Lindell granted that Alabama ran a “tight ship” when it came to elections — but then added, “they were hacked, just like every other state was.”
“According to my packet captures, and the numbers, we have approximately, almost 100,000 votes were flipped in Alabama,” he said later.
Like all of his other claims of election fraud, Lindell did not provide evidence on air. “Packet captures,” or PCAPs, are snapshots of internet traffic that Lindell has said for months will show that the 2020 election was spoiled by Chinese hackers. He promised to show this PCAP evidence at a “Cyber Symposium” he organized last month but… it was a total flop.
“All day Mike Lindell has been on stage saying the cyber experts are happily working on packet captures. We are not. We haven’t been given the packet captures we were promised,” one cybersecurity expert at the symposium lamented at the time. Even people on Lindell’s own cybersecurity team panned the symposium material, with one telling The Washington Times mid-event that he did not have confidence in the information.
So, why did Alabama’s top political figures meet with the millionaire pillow CEO despite his negative credibility on the election integrity issue?
A spokesperson for Gov. Kay Ivey (R) told AL.com that Ivey met “briefly” with Lindell “to welcome him to Alabama.”
“She shared with him how successful Alabama is in running elections,” the spokesperson added. “It was a good, casual conversation. Secretary Merrill wanted to introduce them, and she is always proud to welcome visitors to Alabama.”
