Mike Lindell, the flamboyant pillow magnate, has spent millions promoting the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump — a claim that has been roundly rejected by cybersecurity experts, government officials and numerous courts. But late last year, Lindell crowed that a federal judge had vindicated him at last.
“I get to take off my tin foil hat!” he said on a podcast hosted by former Trump White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, removing a baseball cap covered in aluminum foil that he had worn as a prop. “You know, that’s what that judge said, we’re not a conspiracy theory guy anymore! Praise the Lord.”
The judge had said no such thing. She had not mentioned Lindell at all — or the outlandish election-fraud claims he and other Trump allies have advanced.
The people U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg declared to be not “conspiracy theorists of any variety” are the largely left-leaning plaintiffs in a lawsuit that was filed in Georgia long before the 2020 election and that is slated to go to trial this week. They argue that voting machines there present security risks that state officials are constitutionally obligated to address — and they have the backing, Totenberg wrote, of “some of the nation’s leading cybersecurity experts and computer scientists.”
A favorable outcome for the plaintiffs would have extraordinary implications: Georgia, one of the swing states that decided the last presidential election, could head into the 2024 cycle with machines that a federal judge has deemed dangerously vulnerable to security breaches, at least as currently operated. Though it would be aimed at ensuring a more secure voting system, such a ruling could have unpredictable implications for the public understanding of election integrity, particularly if it is mischaracterized by those seeking to sow doubt about past and future elections.
Lindell and other MAGA-world personalities — including Trump — have long sought to harness the case to bolster the false claim that voting machines were rigged to help Joe Biden win. Now, with the trial set to begin in Atlanta, Trump allies are positioning themselves to leverage political advantage from any finding that the machines are not secure.
“It saddens me to say it, but it’s likely that any legal ruling that affirms vulnerabilities in voting technology — even in support of prudent goals, like mitigating risk — will be cynically exploited to undermine voter confidence in elections, for purely political ends,” said Edward Perez, former director for civic integrity at Twitter and a board member for the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for transparent open-source election technology. (Two of the plaintiffs’ experts serve on the nonprofit’s board of advisers.)
The plaintiffs in the case, known as Curling v. Raffensperger, argue that the touch-screen computers on which Georgians cast their votes are vulnerable to malicious attack and human error.They do not argue that the alleged vulnerabilities have actually been exploited — in fact, they say there is no evidence that has occurred.
Further, the plaintiffs argue that the secret copying of voting software in rural Coffee County in 2021 by Trump allies — an episode that the plaintiffs unearthed and that has since become part of the criminal indictment against Trump and others in Fulton County — exacerbated the risk to future elections by giving unauthorized individuals a virtual road map to hack into machines and manipulate results.
Marilyn Marks, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance, one of the plaintiffs, said Georgia must acknowledge and deal with the alleged problems with its voting system, regardless of the efforts by some to mischaracterize the case. “We cannot back down from what must be done based on what Trump or any other politician says about it,” she said in an interview….