- An
Idaho official saidMike Lindell would incur the cost of an audit of the state's election system. - Lindell said votes for Trump were mechanically switched in some counties to be in favor of Biden.
The chief deputy secretary of state in Idaho said the state "will be sending" Mike Lindell, MyPillow's CEO, the bill for an audit it launched to dispute his claims of voter fraud in the
Last month, Lindell sent Idaho election officials a document titled "The Big Lie" that alleged widespread voter fraud in the state, saying votes cast for President
Trump won Idaho by one of the biggest margins, with a 31-point lead over Biden.
"Once we had the document in hand, we immediately believed there was something amiss," Chief Deputy Secretary Chad Houck told the local news outlet KMVT at the time.
"This document alleged electronic manipulation in all 44 counties. At least seven Idaho counties have no electronic steps in their vote counting processes," Houck added. "That was a huge red flag, and one we knew we could either prove or disprove fairly directly."
Idaho election officials launched an investigation into Lindell's claims, only to find marginal human errors in counting - none to the extent that Lindell alleged in the document.
Houck, a Republican who is running for secretary of state in Idaho, appeared on CNN on Thursday to discuss the audit and how it debunked Lindell's claims.
"Lindell comes out with these claims that across the state, universally, every county in the state of Idaho - and for that matter, every county in the United States - was actually off by about 8.4%," Houck said. "We looked at that and said that is an absolute impossibility."
"We have seven counties in the state of Idaho that could not be mechanically manipulated because they actually still tally their votes," he continued. "They're small enough to do that in a paper ledger or tally book. How would you manipulate a paper ledger?"
Houck added that the state election officials "actually will be totaling up the expenses that were incurred in the process and we'll be sending him a bill."
He went on to say that, despite knowing that Lindell's claims were not true at the get-go, Houck wanted to do his part in protecting the integrity of the state's election system.
"This was never about Mike Lindell. This was never about a partisan position on this," he said. "This is about going after the integrity of not only the election system in Idaho, but people going after the integrity of the election system as a whole."
He said claims such as Lindell's come across as "criticizing and impinging the integrity" of election officials, professional election administrators, and their teams.
"And that reputation is something we work very, very hard to defend," Houck said.
-New Day (@NewDay) October 7, 2021