Lindell’s quest is decidedly quixotic, beyond the fringe to some, particularly in light of outsized voting-fraud claims made by right-wing election vigilantes, such as True the Vote, that have consistently withered under scrutiny and failed to materialize around Election Day.
But there is a method to Lindell’s mayhem, which is both relentless and accepted as bedrock truth by a subset of Trump’s most ardent and impressionable supporters. With this comes a real danger of inciting more threats to elections officials, distrust of elections, generally, and civil strife. Come 2024, thousands of like-minded local activists may be receiving deeply misinformed messages — via Lindell’s social media network that their local polls and county election headquarters might be under an active cyber-attack.
At the Springfield conference center, Lindell, the ringmaster, instructed everyone to look at the big screen. A video camera from a drone hovered above the building. The drone approached it and flew into its lobby, and then into the large meeting room. It landed on a table on the stage where Lindell sat in front of a banner with a badge-shaped “Election Crime Bureau” logo.
The room cheered as Lindell removed and displayed its cargo. He held up a small, dark gray, electronic gadget with a blue, wallet-size screen. The gadget, he said, would prove that computers and devices used at America’s polling places and election headquarters were connected to the internet, were going online and offline, and, thus, could be invisibly manipulated from afar by their political enemies – who he frequently called the “uni-party,” meaning anti-Trump Democrats and Republicans.
“What if I told you that there was a device that had been made for the first time in history that can tell you that the machine was online?” Lindell said. “And then you could tell what the device was, where it was at, what the name of it was – ES&S 60503 – and you knew the second it went online. Well, this is what we’ve been working on for over a year. And I’m going to show you.”
He played a short video with a British-accented narrator who described what he called the “Wireless Monitoring Device.”
As the narrator told it, this WMD — not to be confused with the common acronym for “weapon of mass destruction” — was more than a box listing WiFi signals like one’s phone. It would find and identify “access points,” “routers”, “printers,” “computers,” “phones” and other devices using WiFi. It would identify their makes, models and serial numbers. It would detect online commands that engaged polling station electronics.
It would not, however, interfere with data transmission. Rather, it would send, in less than a minute, all of the detected information to a nationwide hub – the “Election Crime Bureau.” This Election Crime Bureau, in turn, would send alerts and texts via an app to activists living near the surveilled sites.
“You get the gist of the reporting, right?” Lindell said. “You’re gonna sit in your easy chair on your phone or whatever. And you’re gonna see real-time crime coming. You’re gonna know what a box [election computer] goes live. You’re going to know when a router goes live, when a polling book goes live and everything, okay… We will now become a policing of our own election.”
Lindell would not reveal where the Election Crime Bureau was located nor who would be staffing it….