Idaho Election Officials Not So Sure They Agree 100% With MyPillow Guy's Forensic Work

He's kinda funny lookin'. More n' most people even.

MyPillow guy and elections expert Mike Lindell has in recent weeks moved beyond insisting there was massive fraud in all the states where Donald Trump lost in 2020, and is now going around claiming that vast computer fraud stole votes from Trump even in states the Great Man won, like Alabama, and now Idaho, which is, dear readers, not exactly full of progressive liberal hippie types, at least outside certain parts of Boise and the college towns.

But when you have a racket, you have to keep flogging it, so Lindell recently sent a very serious letter to elections officials in Idaho, insisting that electronic voting equipment had switched votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in every single one of Idaho's 44 counties. Lindell also promoted his "analysis" on such social media he hasn't been kicked off of, prompting angry calls and emails to county elections officials, too. Mike Rosedale, the Republican county clerk for Bonner County, up in the panhandle, said the reaction from outraged Lindell fans felt like "a freight train coming at me." 

Now, let's just remind you that Donald Trump won Idaho in 2020 with 64 percent of the vote. In Bonner County, Trump did even better, winning just short of 67 percent of the vote, with 18,369 votes to Biden's 8,310 votes, plus the expected smattering of votes for fringe candidates. Kanye West somehow got 102 votes in Bonner. Go figure.

But you see, in Lindell's very smart "analysis," Trump really should have gotten far more votes, so the only possible explanation has to be massive fraud. Not that he presented any evidence of it, beyond a spreadsheet he cleverly titled "The Big Lie," which pretended to specify exactly how many votes were supposedly stolen from Trump and switched to Biden in each county.

Astonishingly, the document didn't bowl over the folks at the Idaho Secretary of State's office, who quickly noticed a bit of a problem with Lindell's assertion of statewide electronic vote theft, as they explained in a statement this week:

"Once we had the document in hand, we immediately believed there was something amiss" says Chief Deputy Secretary Chad Houck. "This document alleged electronic manipulation in all 44 counties. At least 7 Idaho counties have no electronic steps in their vote counting processes," states Houck, "That was a huge red flag, and one we knew we could either prove or disprove fairly directly."

Houck told the Spokane Spokesman-Review  that his office considers the vote tabulation process in those counties to be protected by a "'Flintstone gap,'because there's no equipment in the process. It's still Stone Age."

Well there's a lesson for Lindell: Don't go around making accusations of computer hacking in places where the votes are still tabulated on the county clerk's fingers and recorded on clay tablets. We could pretty much stop right here, but the details are kind of fun if you're a big election process nerd.

Just to be on the safe side (and no doubt to forestall outraged howls that Lindell's bullshit accusations weren't being taken seriously), the secretary of state's office sent examiners to the clerks' offices in two of Idaho's smallest counties, Camas and Butte, to conduct an in-person inspection of the ballots, and presumably to look in every closet for a hidden Fraud-O-Matic 9000 machine. To make it all official, the examination was conducted with representatives from both the Democratic and Republican parties observing.

While both recounts were videotaped, we'll admit we didn't review them to see whether any of the participants commented on what a colossal waste of time it was. ( Butte County Recount / Camas County Recount ) We'd check, but we have a whole lot of anime to catch up on this weekend, including the series finale of the  Higurashi When They Cry sequel. 

In any case, the investigations found that both counties' vote totals were indeed consistent with the official canvas, except that in Camas County, there was one extra vote for Trump, out of 675 ballots total, a .14 percent discrepancy. Lindell's spreadsheet had somehow decided Trump had to be missing 54 votes in the tiny county.

In Butte County, Joe Biden still had the same 188 votes as in the official canvas, not the 130 votes Lindell insisted he "should" have had. But the hand recount did find an error! Donald Trump actually received nine fewer votes than the official tally of 1,202 votes reflected. So there's your massive fraud: the official count was .63 percent greater than Trump's real total. The mistake seems to have resulted from

thermal printed ballots that come from assisted voter terminals, which are the same size as the absentee envelopes contained in the same storage boxes. As such, adjusted sorting and storage policies were recommended should a recount occur in the future.

Thank Crom for Mike Lindell's fog and phony show, since by promoting absolute hogwash, he inadvertently led the county to make a minor adjustment to its election processes that had nothing to do with any bizarre tampering conspiracy.

After the recount, we'll assume the local officials took everyone out for Bronto-burgers in their foot-powered car.

Meanwhile, up in Bonner County, Mr. Rosedale announced that his office would conduct a hand recount of the county's 2020 ballots as well; that show is being livestreamed right now if you want to waste a perfectly good Saturday. He too is certain that the official results are accurate, and that the recount will not find anything like the 2,200-vote undercount that Lindell insists happened.

Rosedale also pointed out to the Spokane Spokesman-Review  that there's no way Bonner County's election equipment could be hacked, either:

"I said, 'That's impossible,' " Rosedale said. Bonner County does use a machine to tally its votes, but that machine is not connected to internet, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and thus has no IP address to be hacked.

Weirdly, according to the Bonner County Daily Bee, when the accusations of vote tampering were first circulating on Lindell's website, Rosedale issued a press release   endorsing Lindell's big lies — but only in those damn Democrat states, it seems:

While I generally agree with Mike Lindell's focus on massive voter fraud in 6-plus key states, his facts regarding Idaho quite miss the mark. Well, completely miss the mark.

Gosh, he's really helping to tamp down the paranoia and fearmongering that have led Americans to distrust the voting process, you bet.

So what the hell was Lindell's made-up claim based on, if anything? Houck thinks he's figured it out. 

Houck said such a result [in Camas and Butte counties] was to be expected, because it appeared the spreadsheet circulated by Lindell took a vote discrepancy and applied it universally across all counties. He estimated it took him and his office 45 minutes, perhaps less, to determine that the document was using a formula, rather than verified accounts of fraud, in its estimations of ballot numbers.

Houck doesn't appear to have specified what wrong data point Lindell started with, but the point is, yet again, it's all bullshit, and Donald Trump did just fine in Idaho, even without running up an imaginary score, the end.

[ AP / Idaho Secretary of State / Spokesman-Review / Bonner County Daily Bee / Bonner County recount livestream ]

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