Mike Lindell suffers blow in election battle

MyPillow CEO and 2020 election denier Mike Lindell suffered a setback in using his monitoring devices at polling stations, which he claims will make elections secure, after Kentucky officials reportedly said using them is illegal.

Kenton County election officials on Friday, October 20, allegedly said that using Lindell’s Wireless Monitoring Device (WMD) at polls is illegal, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer.

“These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night,” Kenton County Clerk Gabrielle Summe said at the board of elections meeting.

She added that the devices, which Lindell said reveal whether voting machines are online when they should not be, might unlawfully identify voters and were possibly small enough to get inside polling stations without being detected.

The Kenton County board of elections, comprised of four people, unanimously voted that poll station workers would not allow people to use the device.

Kenton County Sheriff Charles Korzenborn, a Republican who also sits on the board of elections, said deputies would arrest anyone breaking the law at the polls, according to the Enquirer.

Newsweek was not able to immediately verify the veracity of the report and has contacted Lindell and the Kenton County Clerk’s office for comment via email.

According to Kentucky state law, voting machines must not be connected to the internet and it is a felony to connect one online.

Donald Trump-aligned Lindell unveiled the WMD at his Election Summit in Springfield, Missouri, in August and challenged the claim that the voting machines were not connected to the internet.

“I’ve been telling you all, we’ve been told a lie over years now that the machines are not on the internet,” Lindell told audience members.

“What if there was a device that showed you ‘Hey, there’s a device on my network, there’s a device online,'” he continued. “And then you could tell what the device was, where it was at, what the name of it was[…]and you knew the second it went online.”

Michon Lindstrom, director of communications for Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams allegedly said in a statement obtained by the Enquirer: “These devices appear to be nothing more sophisticated or dangerous than a simple cell phone, which can detect a Wi-Fi signal. The presence of Wi-Fi in a building does not mean that ballot scanners are connected to the internet. State law prohibits that and we do not certify ballot scanners for use if they have any capacity for connectivity.”

The outlet reported Summe, who has not seen or inspected the WMDs, had claimed that while it is impossible for voting machines to connect to the internet due to not being built with a modem, Wi-Fi signals will be present at polling stations as they are located at schools, community centers, and other sites with internet connections.

“So, what is the true purpose of this? Is it going to interfere with what happens on election day? Is it going to modify something? Is it designed to come out with a specific result to prove something? I’m not sure what they want to prove by it,” the newspaper reported Summe as saying.

Lindell has been facing numerous legal and financial troubles after he made unfounded claims that Trump won the 2020 election and that companies who provided voting machines conspired to rig the result against him.

He faces defamation lawsuits brought by Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, who argue their reputations were significantly damaged by Lindell’s claims. The MyPillow CEO has also said he faces several IRS audits.

“I feel like we’re in this major battle, which we are, but we’re getting through it,” Lindell previously said on his channel The Lindell Report, broadcast via the video network FrankSpeech. “There’s light at the end of these attacks, and we are going to win.”

Last year, eight prominent Republicans, including judges and lawyers, reached an “unequivocal” conclusion that the 2020 election was not “stolen” by Democrat and White House incumbent President Joe Biden.