Mike Lindell’s Demand for a Recount Rejected After He Misses Deadline And Refuses to Pay Fee
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File
Conspiracy– and pillow-monger Mike Lindell was demanding a recount after he lost the Republican primary to be Minnesota’s next governor, but he failed to pay the required fee and file the paperwork by the deadline, the Minnesota Secretary of State confirmed Tuesday.
The 65-year-old ran in a crowded GOP primary field that included Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives Lisa Demuth (R) and healthcare tech executive Kendall Qualls; Demuth won with a sizable margin over Lindell, 43 percent to 32 percent of the primary vote.
For the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, which affiliates with the national Democratic Party, former vice presidential candidate and incumbent Gov. Tim Walz is not running for re-election. The field largely cleared for Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN); none of her primary opponents had held elected office before and have raised just a few thousand dollars all together compared to Klobuchar’s $7 million-plus haul. She coasted to a primary win with just under 90 percent of the vote.
Lindell scored President Donald Trump’s endorsement in July and initially had a small lead in the polls, sparking alarm among Republicans who worried his prominent role as a promulgator of baseless claims of election fraud made him weaker as a general election candidate. The news he was not yet registered to vote in Minnesota less than a month before the primary did not help.
After Demuth’s win, Lindell refused to concede and declared that he was willing to spend “upwards of $1 million” to pursue a recount.
It turns out he wasn’t even willing to spend $825,000, according to a report by Angie Orellana Hernandez at NOTUS Tuesday.
In a statement the week after the primary, Lindell vowed he would be personally funding to audit and conduct a recount of “every paper ballot cast in the Aug. 11, 2026 Republican primary election for Governor of Minnesota,” claiming he had proof of “vote totals that moved backwards during the reporting,” “counties reporting more votes than cast,” and “unusual synchronized vote totals across all seven Republican candidates,” and other signs he claimed were evidence someone had tampered with the election.
But the deadline for wiring the $825,000 fee to the state passed on Tuesday, a spokesperson for Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told NOTUS. Simon’s office oversees elections in the state, and told NOTUS’ reporter that Lindell had not paid the fee nor even submitted the required paperwork.
One day prior, Lindell’s campaign had complained about the recount rules and procedures the secretary of state had communicated. According to Lindell, the office had any recount would only include ballots cast for him or Demuth, and not the other five people on the GOP primary ballot.
Lindell insisted his team had uncovered “anomalies” for the votes cast for “all of the candidates, not simply Lindell and Demuth,” and further complained that the recount would not include the Democratic voters — the ones that went nearly 90 percent to Klobuchar. He called this an “untenable position” and blasted the secretary of state’s plan as an “unlawful recount.”
Cassondra Knudson, a spokesperson for the secretary of state, confirmed that Lindell had sued Simon and the Minnesota Canvassing Board Monday in what NOTUS described as “a last-ditch attempt to keep the recount effort alive.” Knudson said that the secretary of state’s office had provided Lindell with sufficient time to dispute the recount plan should he so chose, and argued it “follow[ed] state law and administrative rules on recount procedures and is consistent with previous recount plans.”
“Minnesota’s elections are fair, accurate, honest, and secure,” Simon has said in a press release this summer in response to efforts by the Trump administration to make inquiries into Minnesota’s elections.
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