Trump-backed Mike Lindell says he’s ready to spend $1M for vote recount despite losing Minnesota gov race by 11 points

John Bowden Thu, August 20, 2026 at 5:26 PM UTC

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‘My Pillow’ salesman Mike Lindell says he can’t afford to pay court fees, but is self-funding a recount of the Minnesota gubernatorial primary (Getty)

Mike Lindell is “investigating” another election. This time, it’s his own.

After losing last week’s Republican primary for the govenor’s race in Minnesota, the Trump-backed pillow salesman and political surrogate to the president of the United States told NBC News that he had already put a team of people to work looking into the results of the election for signs of fraud.

In public statements on his social media and website, Lindell said that he would privately fund the effort — his website now bears a donation portal for the “Lindell Offense Fund” on a webpage that claims the Minnesota election data shows evidence of “computer manipulation”.

The Minnesota secretary of state’s general counsel, Lauren Bethke, informed Lindell that a full hand recount and audit would cost about $825,000 and Lindell, who has repeated debunked claims that voting machines rigged the 2020 election, told NBC News that he expects the overall amount to reach “upwards of $1 million” because of additional actions, including hiring his own team to investigate the race, a cost he said he is prepared to pay.

He added that even if his effort was unsuccessful, it could succeed in another way: By leading to Minnesota election officials making the decision to eliminate electronic voting machines statewide. On X, Lindell claimed that his effort would be the “largest paper ballot recount audit of its kind in U.S. history.”

“This is much bigger than Minnesota. This could be the gateway to get rid of electronic voting machines across the country,” said Lindell.

“One of the few good election laws Minnesota does have is that as a candidate, I have the right to completely audit and hand count every ballot in the state, and I am going to exercise that right to the full extent of the law,” he added in a statement, according to a local news site.

The same webpage announcing Lindell’s recount and the crusade against voting machines in Minnesota contains links to Lindell’s other private battle: The defamation lawsuit he lost to voting machine company Smartmatic, which is now costing him $500 a day in court fines as he reportedly refuses to pony up for the settlement.

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In a conversation with NBC News on Wednesday, Lindell said he didn’t plan to pay the court’s fines or the sanctions resulting from his nonpayment, which NBC reports now outnumbers the original sum of about $56,000. He released a video message alongside a press release Wednesday announcing the effort, claiming that despite his owed court costs, he’d be willing to spend “upwards of $1 million” on the recount effort. He didn’t specify if it would be his own money.

Lindell says he hopes his recount effort will persuade state officials to ditch electronic voting machines (Getty)

Lindell suffered a crushing defeat in last Tuesday’s Republican primary election. Endorsed by Donald Trump in July, the pillow vendor and longtime election conspiracist’s performance was a clear indication of the limits of Trump’s king-making abilities.

He lost to state House speaker Lisa Demuth by almost 11 percentage points, adding to the growing list of Trump-backed candidates who’ve lost in GOP primaries this cycle — a number which is already blowing past the combined total of the 2018, 2020 and 2024 election cycles.

Had Lindell won, he’d face the daunting task now in front of Demuth: A November general election fight with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic nominee for governor in Minnesota. Klobuchar is a popular fourth-term senator who ran for president briefly in 2020 and won her own primary with more than 80 percent of the vote, outperforming other Washington politicians like Sen. Michael Bennet who’ve attempted to pivot to state-level offices this year.

The commanding victory by Klobuchar suggests that she has little if any work to do in unifying Democratic voters around her candidacy, and can more than likely focus on attacking Republicans in a year when the GOP president’s brand in Washington is hovering around all-time lows.

Had Lindell won his primary, he'd be facing Amy Klobuchar in the November gubernatorial election (AFP/Getty)

Lindell, under Minnesota law, is not eligible for a publicly-funded recount. Those only take place in a race for a constitutional office, which includes the governor, when the margin of victory by the winning candidate is within 0.25 percentage points.

But he is eligible to fund his own official recounting of the ballots, provided that he submits his request and the necessary funding within five days of the “canvassing” of the primary election — an official act that takes place about a week after the primary itself, certifying the results.

Trump endorsed Mike Lindell on Truth Social in July but did not campaign for him in person. The president’s poor track record with endorsements this cycle is beginning to show, and on Wednesday he tried to walk back one of those endorsements posthumously after the defeat of scandal-plagued Cory Mills, a Florida congressman, in a Republican primary. He’d originally endorsed Mills in February.

“I told Congressman Cory Mills of Florida, a friend of mine, to get out of the Race, but he wouldn’t listen. He thought he could win, so who can blame him?” Trump claimed Wednesday in a Truth Social post.

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Source: “AOL Breaking”