Election Hacks by Bob Zeidman

Please tell us about the characters from your book Election Hacks.

Mike Lindell

Mike Lindell is an admitted alcohol, drug, and gambling addict who turned to Christianity, started a successful company, made a fortune, and embodied the American Dream.

His entrepreneurial activities started out of school as a bar owner, admitting in his autobiography that he sometimes lied to his customers to get them to buy more products or drink more beers. He has an obsessive personality. Like a fast train. When it’s going in the right direction, it’s great. When it jumps the track, it’s dangerous. He was reckless many times throughout his life. Like the time he jumped into a pool with his wife and the $14,000 in cash he’d made at card counting at blackjack—money he needed to pay the mortgage and support his business.

He started MyPillow and made it hugely successful. He calls MyPillow “his new drug.” As an obsessive personality, he always needs something to focus his attention on. Now his obsession is election fraud, and he will stop at nothing to prove he’s right that Donald Trump was actually elected by the American public in 2020 as President of the United States.

Lindell’s lawyer Alec Beck was a partner at Barnes & Thornburg, but he left the firm two months before the symposium where I proved that Lindell’s election data was bogus. He represented Lindell as a partner at Parker, Daniels, Kibort. He also defended Lindell against the defamation lawsuits from voting machine manufacturers Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems. Beck was pleasant. He didn’t seem stupid, but also not particularly impressive as a lawyer.

His main problem, and it was a big one, was that it seemed he hadn’t prepped or coordinated the witnesses. There was no strategy. They all gave answers that contradicted each other and sometimes contradicted their own written statements or earlier testimony. Even if he thought this case didn’t really matter, it was a chance to get their stories straight for the multi-billion-dollar Dominion and Smartmatic cases. Those cases surely matter!

Doug Frank

Doug Frank was on Lindell’s team that allegedly evaluated my report showing that Lindell’s data was bogus. Frank was a physicist who had done some impressive work in the past. He got a PhD, did some interesting research, wrote some papers, and was now teaching high school math. Because of his association with Lindell, he’d suddenly been thrust into the national limelight and was getting the respect I think he’d craved his entire life.

Many of the characters in the book are like Frank, suddenly getting national attention and respect, so it’s very hard to realize that what you’re doing is wrong, based on misrepresentations, and bad for the country. Yet Frank continues to give talks throughout the country and lobby for the removal of voting machines.

Todd Sanders

Todd Sanders was another judge who allegedly evaluated my report. He left virtually no trace online before the Cyber Symposium and very little trace afterwards. He claimed to have led a NASA Space Shuttle Internet project, but I couldn’t find any record of that.

I suspect Sanders was a technician not an engineer. He never supplied us with his resume, and he wasn’t on LinkedIn. He seemed like an ordinary person with no particularly impressive credentials who somehow stumbled onto Lindell’s team and got national attention. He seemed to just be enjoying the newfound respect as long as it lasted.

Kurt Olsen

Kurt Olsen was a lawyer who, despite admitting to being non-technical, was a member of the panel that allegedly judged my entry. He refused to answer most questions in deposition on the basis of client-attorney privilege.

Right after the symposium, Olsen was let go by the firm he co-founded, Klafter, Olsen & Lesser. Olsen had little national notoriety until he was approached by President Trump and Lindell, after which he became the center of attention as Lindell’s and Trump’s leader of the national “Stop The Steal” movement that questioned the 2020 election results and litigated them around the country. As with the others, he quickly went from obscurity to national attention, though much of that attention was not positive.

Josh Merritt

Josh Merritt was a smart, straightforward, disciplined guy who had written about election fraud. He was the only one on Lindell’s team who questioned the validity of Lindell’s data. Merritt was also the only person on Lindell’s team who talked like an engineer.

My lawyer had to stop him at his deposition when he went into long, technical descriptions of networks, packet data, and compression and encryption algorithms. This is what I expected from an engineer. Frank and Sanders gave answers of only a few words, and in those few words, they still got the technical details wrong.

Merritt was a whistleblower that Lindell set out to slander publicly for stating to newspapers that Lindell’s data was bogus. Merritt agreed to testify for me, and his deposition went very well, as he explained that even Lindell’s team agreed the data was bogus though only he had the courage to go public with that information.

Doug Gould

Doug Gould was Lindell’s expert witness. Gould was an elderly man with a quiet, authoritative voice who had attended Lindell’s Cyber Symposium. At the symposium, Gould had admitted to me the data was bogus, so he was a strange choice because Gould and I had spoken, he attended the conference, he examined the data, and he was on record in media interviews that he was unable to validate the data. A truly independent expert could surmise, obfuscate, avoid, and confuse in his report and his testimony to find some way to support Lindell and his data and throw doubt on my findings. For Gould, that was hard to do.

Reading between the lines of his very short resume, it appeared Gould was a technician all his life and had no degrees. To increase their credibility, experts always mention their degrees and where they got them, preferably from prestigious universities, so not listing them was a red flag. I figured that he was using his appearance at the Cyber Symposium to get notoriety and speaking engagements. I searched the Internet for him, but there was no record of him having done anything of note in technology until after the symposium. No published papers or articles. No interviews or quotes in magazines. No listings on committees. He had a bare LinkedIn page with lots of jobs but no academic degrees, no honors, no publications, and no posts. Not even a picture of himself. It appeared that like others that Lindell relied upon, Gould was leveraging his association with Lindell and the election fraud story to build his reputation and gain the notoriety that had not been given to him during his career.

Brian Glasser

My lawyer Brian Glasser is the founding partner of the law firm Bailey Glasser. He’s a Democrat. His partner Ben Bailey is a Republican. They pride themselves on seeking truth and not being biased by politics. Brian would be the lead attorney at the arbitration.

He fits the stereotype of a litigation attorney. He’s big—over six feet tall—with a good ol’ boy, slap-you-on-the-back, let’s-grab-a-beer kind of demeanor. His voice is loud, especially his laugh. Even when he’s in his office down the hall, a disembodied howl can come suddenly and unexpectedly and boom throughout their offices in Georgetown, always startling me when I was there preparing for deposition or trial. For those readers old enough to remember starting a gas engine that’s low on gas, or flooded with gas, the engine starts with a loud burst of rat-a-tat-tat that grows loud but sputters out. That’s Brian’s laugh. But while he comes across as kind of a Jewish redneck from West Virginia, his record shows him as brilliant.

He has two bachelor’s degrees, one from West Virginia University and another from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His law degree is from Harvard. He likes to take on big corporations and wealthy individuals. And he usually wins. Big. Hundreds of millions of dollars big.

Cary Joshi

Brian assigned research and prep work to Cary Joshi, another partner at the firm. Cary is small, athletically thin, with short, dark hair, and a cheery soprano voice. Her light olive skin and her last name are the only signs of her Indian heritage. She’s easy to underestimate, but no one should.

Her Ivy League bona fides include an undergraduate degree from Yale and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Her passion is fighting for the rights of female student-athletes under Title IX and has won major victories at Brown University, the College of William & Mary, the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, East Carolina University, Dartmouth College, Clemson University, the University of St. Thomas, La Salle University, and Dickinson College.

She likes to joke and to laugh. In depositions, she has a unique manner. Some attorneys are matter of fact in depositions; they just want to get the facts to prepare their case. Others are aggressive, hoping to push the witness to the breaking point where he or she angrily admits guilt or at least makes a mistake. Cary is pleasant. Sociable. She makes witnesses so comfortable that they often just start having a friendly conversation, giving out much more information than they should. Especially men. Smiling amiably, she takes detailed notes.

About the Book

Election Hacks Lindell v. Zeidman: Exposing the $5 million election myth by Bob Zeidman

Genre: Nonfiction, Politics, Current Affairs

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate, has been inciting crowds by publicly declaring he has proof of voting machine tampering that threw the 2020 election from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Bob Zeidman, who invented the field of software forensics, was invited by Lindell in 2021 to examine and verify the alleged proof. What he found was bogus data, manipulated results, and dangerous conspiracy theories. This is the story of Bob’s successful $5 million lawsuit against Lindell and his uncovering of a scandal leading to some of the top political leaders and advisors in America. Was the election stolen? Maybe. Maybe not. But Lindell’s bogus claims have prevented legitimate investigations into voter fraud.

Election Hacks is not just an important book about the cries of a stolen 2020 presidential election, it’s also a warning for the 2024 election and all future elections. It’s a personal story of a man who found the truth and pursued it by going up against a rich, powerful, influential businessman. It’s a technological mystery, a courtroom drama, and a character study of extremists and their enablers. It’s about human nature and how people can so easily be led astray. And it’s about standing up for the truth, even when that truth may turn out to belie your beliefs and alienate your friends.

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About Bob Zeidman

Bob Zeidman is an inventor, author, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and high-stakes poker player. He created the field of software forensics and founded Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation to develop and sell software forensics tools. He is the founder of Zeidman Consulting, an engineering consulting company that has worked on over 260 major litigations involving billions of dollars of disputed intellectual property. His cases have included ConnectU v. Facebook, on which the Oscar-winning movie The Social Network is based, and Oracle v. Google that went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. He is the inventor of the famous Silicon Valley Napkin on display at the Computer History Museum. He is also a high-stakes poker player, and his latest tech venture is Good Beat Poker, a new way to play and watch poker online.

Bob writes about politics, society, and business for national magazines. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news and $5 million.

Bob has a master’s degree from Stanford University and two bachelor’s degrees from Cornell University.