Mike Lindell appears at his booth on Day 3 of CPAC 2026, in Grapevine, Texas, on March 27, 2026 (Photo by Laura Brett/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images).
An engineer who proved MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell”s 2020 election conspiracy theory wrong and was awarded $5 million, only for the federal courts to wipe that arbitration win away, is hoping he’ll get one more chance to state his claim.
Court documents reviewed by Law&Crime show that Robert “Bob” Zeidman, on Feb. 13, filed a motion for a rehearing “by the original arbitration panel” in light of the fact that the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court nuked his case.
One month prior to filing the motion, the high court refused to take up his petition, meaning Lindell’s ill-fated “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge at a South Dakota election fraud “Cyber Symposium” in 2021 would not be as costly a fiasco as it seemed. Lindell has since taken steps to ensure the status quo remains.
In an April 30 filing, Lindell Management LLC attorney Barbara Podlucky Berens asked Senior U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim, a Bill Clinton appointee, to agree that Zeidman should get no such rehearing because he would have “no viable theory” to collect the $5 million upon a “second bite of the apple” before the arbitration panel.
Initially, the panel decided that Zeidman, a software developer who supported President Donald Trump, proved Lindell was wrong that data showed China had interfered with the 2020 election.
While Tunheim later upheld the $5 million reward in February 2024, that ruling in Zeidman’s favor was relatively short-lived because the 8th Circuit took Lindell off the hook. There, circuit judges noted that even Tunheim had questions about the contest as advertised versus the contest rules. When advertising the challenge, Lindell said his team of experts would provide “cyber data and packet captures from the 2020 November election” and added that the upshot of the challenge was to “find proof that this cyber data is not valid data from the November Election.”
The “poorly written” challenge rules Zeidman signed, on the other hand, didn’t mention “packet captures.”
“[P]articipants 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,” the rules said.
In awarding Zeidman $5 million, the arbitrators said that he “proved that each file did not include packet capture data (PCAP) and thus was not related to the November 2020 election, so he had satisfied the Challenge rules.” The 8th Circuit said the consideration of that “extrinsic evidence” was wrong.
“[T]he [arbitration] panel explicitly agreed with the parties that the relevant contract terms were unambiguous, recognized that Minnesota law governed and therefore barred the use of extrinsic evidence to interpret the unambiguous provisions, and then used extrinsic evidence to rule that Zeidman won the Challenge Contest because the data [Lindell Management] provided contestants was not ‘PCAP data,'” the appellate opinion said. “Under our controlling decisions, the panel exceeded its authority.”
In short, both the district court and the appellate court agreed that the arbitration panel used additional language outside the terms of the challenge rules themselves to interpret the contract, which circuit judges said was legally improper under Minnesota law.
Unsurprisingly, Zeidman disagreed and asked SCOTUS to answer whether the “manifest disregard standard remains a valid basis for vacating an arbitration award.” The justices would not act, however, in a big boost for Lindell.
Although Lindell’s legal-financial issues have since mounted on other fronts, his latest filing submits that the “Prove Mike Wrong” debacle has reached the absolute end of the road.
“Zeidman’s alleged successful demonstration regarding the data at issue was based solely on the absence of capture packet data. Thus, in order to succeed, this claim, like the breach of contract claim, is contingent on the validity of the extracontractual data-format requirement imposed by the Panel,” the filing said. “And like the breach of contract claim, the Eighth Circuit’s express reversal of the Panel’s capture packet data requirement defeats this claim as a matter of law.”
“Any rehearing would thus be futile,” Lindell’s legal team added.
