Montana Viewpoint

Mike Lindell is the CEO of My Pillow company and a leading advocate for rooting out election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. He has had much more success in attracting people to his point of view than he has had in finding evidence to support it. His claim is that Chinese hackers were able to inflate Biden’s votes by 8.4% nationwide. He stated that the Idaho election results in all 44 counties were electronically manipulated to increase Biden’s votes, but since seven of Idaho’s counties have no electronics to manipulate—all paper and pencil tallies—the Idaho Republican Secretary of State decided to review the results in some of those counties. They did find error, a whopping one tenth of one percent, but far from Lindell’s suggested 8.4%. A citizen has suggested billing Lindell for the cost to the state. Said Idaho’s Chief Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck, “It takes hard work to build confidence in a state’s elections system, and careless accusations like this can cause tremendous harm. Doing nothing and saying nothing would have been like conceding its truth.”

At a symposium put on by Lindell in South Dakota in August, and attended by several Montana legislators, Lindell’s own cyber researcher, Josh Merrit, told the Washington Times “the data, as provided, cannot prove a cyberincursion by China,” while a cyber-security attendee said they’d only been shown “random garbage that wastes our time.”

Nonetheless, the Montana attendees took the polled bull by its invisible horns and in a letter signed by 86 out of 98 Republican legislators have now asked their leaders to conduct an investigation of the 2020 Montana election. This seems strange keeping in mind that Republicans swept every statewide election and took commanding majorities in the House and Senate.

Republican, Democratic, and non-partisan election officers nationwide have stood by the integrity of the election results their offices have presided over. The election “audit” in Arizona’s Maricopa County where Phoenix is located not only failed to make a case for finding fraud but actually found votes that increased Biden’s total over Trump by 360 votes. “The ballots that were provided to us in the coliseum very accurately correlate with the official canvas numbers that came through,” said Logan, president of the company hired by the Arizona Senate to conduct the audit. Notwithstanding that, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are working on similar investigations.

I believe that it is important to question authority, but it is also important to question those who are doing the questioning. And my question is simple. At what point will they be satisfied to put their 2020 election controversy to rest? I suspect the answer will be when they find proof it was unfair, which to me sounds like “never.” With that logic it seems to me that they feel it is more important to raise doubts than it is to find an answer. It is more important to continue the controversy.

In a controversy it is often the case that the goal is to keep the controversy alive rather than to settle it. The benefit of putting a controversy behind us is being able to move forward with a sense of unity and completion. The benefit of continuing the controversy is to achieve confusion and to create doubt and mistrust in the mind of the public. Both can be hailed as in the national interest, but the first strengthens us and the second weakens us as a nation. The benefit of a controversy to those regimes that do not support America is that a divided America is weakened internationally and is vulnerable to further social media manipulation by foreign states.

Our internal political divisions have to be delighting China and Russia and sundry other ideological enemies of America, encouraging them to do what they can to further confuse things. If patriotism is the desire to keep our nation and our institutions strong, then confusion is patriotism’s enemy, and we should be more concerned about bringing this issue to conclusion than aiding and abetting our enemies.

Jim Elliott served 16 years in the Montana Legislature as a state representative and state senator and four years as chairman of the Montana Democratic Party. He lives on his ranch in Trout Creek. Montana Viewpoint appears in weekly papers across Montana.