Idaho Secretary of State Lawerence Denney, a Republican, has now helped shut down a new round of election fraud claims backed by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and CEO who has spent the months since last year’s presidential election casting himself as one of the leading proponents of the lie that the race had been somehow rigged for Biden. Once again, however, Lindell’s claims — which Trump himself has latched onto — have come up short.
As summarized by Idaho’s Chief Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck, a document promoted via a Lindell website “alleged electronic manipulation in all 44 counties” within Idaho — but “[at] least 7 Idaho counties have no electronic steps in their vote counting processes.” Obviously, claiming that electronic manipulation of the election results occurred in all counties within Idaho is easily disproved if certain counties don’t even have electronic steps in their vote tabulation processes. As Houck put it, the claim of statewide electronic manipulation of the election results “was a huge red flag, and one we knew we could either prove or disprove fairly directly.”
Subsequently, Idaho authorities undertook recounts in the state’s Camas and Butte counties — and found that Biden had received exactly the number of votes as local authorities had previously determined. Denney, the Idaho Secretary of State, commented as follows:
‘The office of the Idaho Secretary of State takes free, fair, and accurate elections seriously. So when we are presented with allegations that come with specific details which we can examine, we want to do so.’
The recount in Camas County did apparently uncover a single additional Trump vote — and, in that county, that was it. As reported by a press release from the office of the Idaho Secretary of State, “a similar hand inspection process of the county’s 674 canvassed ballots was originally reported as 507 Trump -149 Biden,” but “the [recount] team… containing bipartisan local representatives, counted 508 votes for Trump, tallying a total of 675 ballots.” In other words, rather than a miscount of a Trump vote as a vote for someone else, a single ballot appears to have been left entirely out of original calculations — but again, it was just a single ballot. As Houck explained, “This human error of 0.14% could easily have been in our own process, or on election day.”
