Mike Lindell talks a lot of shit. He talks a lot of shit about the 2020 election being hacked by China or Iran or whoever. In the course of this crusade Lindell has casually thrown around some pretty advanced technical terms related to “packets” of internet traffic that require quite a bit of computer science knowledge to fully comprehend, knowledge well beyond what the average American – let alone scores of extremely smart and talented above average individuals working in other fields – understands about how electronic communication works, to say nothing of a successful carnival barker of a bedding pitchman who actually doesn’t know anything.

And yet he persists. Without getting into the weeds with every time he’s been wrong and been made to look like a complete asshole, mainly because there are too many to count, this correction by the Republican Idaho Secretary of State, Lawerence Denney, may be the most salient, as this time Lindell can’t hide behind technical jargon and a Deus ex machina explanation for this gaping plot hole in a recent rant about the state’s election (which, by the way is a deep Red State which Trump won by over 30% in 2020). The paraphrased TLDR is “You claimed all 44 counties in our state were remotely ‘hacked’ in the 2020 election, but how the fuck is that possible if 7 of those counties use zero electronic equipment whatsoever for ballot tabulation? Explain that, genius”:

Staff from the Idaho Secretary of State’s office visited two Idaho counties last week following receipt of information that alleged statewide manipulation of Idaho’s election results. ‘The office of the Idaho Secretary of State takes free, fair, and accurate elections seriously,’ says Secretary of State Lawerence Denney, ‘so when we are presented with allegations that come with specific details which we can examine, we want to do so.’ The document in question, dubbed ‘The Big Lie’ and shared publicly by a website bearing the copyright of Michael J. Lindell, claims that votes actually cast for Donald J. Trump had been switched electronically and recorded as votes for Joseph Biden.

‘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, along with members of the IDSOS Elections team, visited Camas and Butte counties, the 42nd and 43rd smallest counties on the list on Sept. 23rd. Not suspecting any issues, these two counties were selected due to their small size, and ease of recount.

Butte County’s official canvas showed 1,202 votes for Trump and 188 votes for Biden. ‘The actual ballots, upon manual inspection and hand-evaluation in the presence of local representatives from both Republican and Democratic parties, in fact showed exactly the expected 188 marked votes for Biden, not 130 as alleged,’ says Houck. The only anomaly was that only 1406 of the 1415 ballots originally tallied for the county’s canvas were counted, resulting in a lower number of 1193 for Trump compared to the canvased 1202. (The remaining 25 ballots represent other candidates as well as overvotes, undervotes, and write-in ballots.) According to Houck, the 9-ballot difference, a 0.63% margin of error, was likely attributed to the 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. Read more.

Does it really matter that Lindell was punked here? Will this give him pause or otherwise induce him to conduct himself with more circumspection going forward? No, and fuck no. This flaying is nonetheless good to keep handy should you find yourself arguing with a true MyBeliever.