Mike Lindell says his Sioux Falls Cyber Symposium will prove election fraud; experts have doubts

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) - You may know him as the My Pillow guy. Minnesota resident Mike Lindell was in Mitchell this past May to announce the launch of his new social media platform, Frank. Now he’s coming back to South Dakota, saying his next visit will be marked in history.

Lindell says he was given an electronic version of every vote cast in the November Presidential election. He plans to show it all at a Cyber Symposium on August 10th, 11th, and 12th in Sioux Falls.

The event’s main focus is based on the claim that the Presidential election was hacked by a foreign country.

“It’s been crooked it’s the biggest crime ever,” said Lindell. “It was massive. It was across every state. And believe me, it’s big here in Sioux Falls.”

At the South Dakota Military Alliance venue, the event is by invitation only for Cyber experts, Politicians, and the media.

“I want these cyber forensic experts all here,” said Lindell. “And because you and I can’t read the stuff that comes in these packet captures, they need to understand it and they do understand it, so they’re going to validate it just like I had cyber experts validate all this, okay?”

The event is only available to the public through a live stream.

“And I do believe that will be one of the most-watched events in history,” said Lindell. “We’re going to run on one screen. The whole election... constant, you know, because it’s a stream of information.”

Lindell claims to have the entirety of the Presidential election results in the form of packet captures.

Brian Linder is an emerging threats expert with Check Point Media, listed among the top ten of cybersecurity companies in the world according to the University of San Diego.

“A packet capture is basically eavesdropping on a computer network, it’s nothing more than that,” said Linder. “The ability to say, what conversations are happening between a device and another device on a network. What they’re going to do with it? Not too much, It’s encrypted. It can’t be trivially decrypted.”

A sample of the packet capture was released by Lindell.

“Experts looked at the so-called packet captures that he had. And in fact, it was not an encrypted packet capture at all,” said Linder. “As a matter of fact, it was an unencrypted stream of meaningless data that mentioned clothing manufacturers it had nothing to do with voting. So he claims to have a raw packet capture that’s encrypted. He doesn’t have that that’s absolutely a false claim based on the data he provided. Completely false.”

The Cyber Symposium is also spearheaded by Phil Waldron, a retired Colonel with the U.S. Army.

“The electronic voting systems that we have, we don’t have free, fair, and transparent elections until we get back to a very fundamental solution: counterfeit-proof paper ballots,” said Waldron.

Minnehaha County Auditor Ben Kyte describes how votes are cast.

“South Dakota we have all paper ballots, right. That’s probably one of the ensuring that factors is that it’s secure,” said Kyte.

Across the nation, only five states have electronic voting systems, according to Ballotpedia. They include Arkansas, Deleware, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

A total of 45 states, including South Dakota, use paper ballots, offering electronics only for those with disabilities as an accessibility accommodation.

Lindell discusses one of the ways he believes an election can be hacked. “Everybody knows that the machines are online, they are hackable, it’s like duh,” said Lindell. “I mean that’s that’s a no-brainer.”

That’s not the case according to South Dakota Secretary of State Steve Barnett.

“There’s no online voting, or none of our machines are connected to the Internet. None of the tabulators are,” said Barnett.

In eleven other states, the company Election Systems and Software confirmed they sold tabulation machines equipped with wireless modems, which could be a security risk.

In South Dakota, ballots are counted at the polling station. They’re sealed for delivery and counted again upon delivery.

“And then we start the process of tabulating the results,” said Kyte.

The port of the tabulation machine is locked until the results are transported onto a flash drive.

“We know what those results are. Our IT staff would then transmit those results to the Secretary of State’s office in Pierre,” said Kyte.

County Auditors make sure the votes they’ve reported match the votes at the Secretary of State’s Office.

The entire process is monitored under the watch of a bi-partisan election board.

“So there’s an equal number of Republicans and Democrats that are here that review those,” said Kyte. “The whole, the whole process is protected.”

Could an entire election be captured electronically?

“To intercept and packet capture all of an election, I think the way the New York Times described it, technically incoherent,” said Linder. “I cannot imagine a scenario where it could be pulled off at all.”

As for any cybersecurity experts attending the event, Linder has heard from his peers.

“No credible cybersecurity expert is going to attend this session. There is a huge and very, very, very curious community who invests their lives in knowing this, would ever attend a session like this.

Lindell says that he’s talked with Governor Kristi Noem about the Cyber Symposium and has her full support. We reached out to the Governor’s Office on July 7th, asking if Noem will attend, and have not received a response.

After the final day of the symposium, Lindell plans to take the results of his disclosure directly to the U.S. Supreme Court for review.

According to a legal adviser: “Lawyers file petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court all the time for a variety of reasons, but very few ever get granted, and there are exceptionally few that can originate in the United States Supreme Court.”

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