Mike Lindell photographed prior to a Donald Trump rally on May 28, 2022 in Casper, Wyoming (Chet Strange/Getty Images).
A software engineer who was awarded a $5 million judgment against Mike Lindell for winning the MyPillow CEO”s contest to debunk claims of foreign interference in the 2020 election — only to have the award reversed by a federal appeals court — says he will be taking his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Robert Zeidman on Monday said he planned to ask the high court to reverse this summer’s ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit after a three-judge panel on the court voided his multi-million dollar victory against the Minnesota pillow magnate. Zeidman claims his case exposes the hierarchical nature of the U.S. legal system, highlighting how the wealthiest litigants are often the most successful.
The case stems from the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump, a claim lionized by Lindell, who went on to issue the “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge at a 2021 South Dakota symposium. Lindell provided data purporting to prove that China had hacked the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.
Zeidman — a Trump supporter himself — rose to the challenge and appeared to win the contest. While Lindell rejected Zeidman’s apparent victory, the engineer was vindicated by a contractually mandated “binding” arbitration panel and then a federal district court in the North Star State. However, the appellate court in July ruled in favor of Lindell.
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The panel reasoned that the language analyzed in arbitration and at the district court included advertisements for the challenge rather than the actual rules of the challenge.
When issuing the challenge, Lindell said his team of experts would provide “cyber data and packet captures from the 2020 November election” and said the upshot of the challenge was to “find proof that this cyber data is not valid data from the November Election.”
But the challenge rules were much less specific, stating in part: “participants will participate in a challenge to prove that the data Lindell provides, and represents reflects information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally does NOT reflect information related to the November 2020 election.”
Essentially, while Zeidman showed that Lindell’s data provided no support for his claims of election hacking, he failed to prove that the data was not “related” to the election in any way.
In an op-ed penned for Slate, Zeidman claimed that he would be appealing to decision to the Supreme Court — not for the money, but because he believes “this case is about our country and its principles.”
His twofold argument first asserts that when “a fanatic like Mike Lindell” spreads lies about the U.S. voting system, it wastes resources and distracts from “the real voting issues.” Second, Zeidman claims that the decision runs contrary to the purpose of binding arbitration:
The U.S. arbitration system is intended to allow a person of modest means to get quicker decisions at lower costs than having to deal with the long, expensive, labyrinthian legal system. I know this from experience because I’ve been waiting four years, at great expense, to get a final decision in this case, and now the wait gets even longer. We can’t let wealthy plutocrats twist the legal system in this way. If this decision stands, it will be a devastating blow to arbitration in America because it means any “binding arbitration decision” can be brought to court and litigated at great length and with potential success. Arbitration outcomes will become a war of attrition, with the wealthier party having the resources to wait out a possible victory rather than taking the clear loss. This is not the system as it is designed, nor is it the system we should want.
Zeidman had not formally filed an application with the Supreme Court as of Monday morning. The attorneys who have represented him in the proceedings thus far, Brian Glasser and Cary Joshi of Bailey Glasser, LLP, did not immediately respond to a message from Law&Crime.
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