The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an arbitration panel overstepped its authority in 2023 when it awarded $5 million to the engineer, Robert Zeidman, of Las Vegas, who took Lindell up on his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge.”
“It’s a great day for our country,” a jubilant Lindell said in an interview. “This is a big win. It opens the door to getting rid of these electronic voting machines and getting paper ballots, hand-counted.”
However, Lindell lost in a different case in Colorado last month. A jury ruled that Lindell defamed a former employee of a voting equipment company by accusing him of treason, and awarded $2.3 million in damages.
Lindell said he is appealing.
As part of a "Cyber Symposium" Lindell hosted in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 2021, Lindell offered $5 million for anyone who could prove that “packet captures” and other data he released there were not valid data from the 2020 election.
Zeidman entered a 15-page report that he said proved the data wasn't what Lindell claimed. Contest judges declined to declare Zeidman a winner, so he filed for arbitration under the contest rules. A panel of three arbitrators concluded that Zeidman had satisfied the rules and awarded him $5 million.
U.S. District Judge John Tunheim affirmed the award last year. He expressed concern about how the arbitrators interpreted what he called a “poorly written contract,” but he said courts have only limited authority to overrule arbitration awards and ordered Lindell to pay up.
But the appeals court ruled Wednesday that the arbitrators went beyond the contractual language of the official contest rules in deciding how to construe them, instead of sticking to the document itself. The appeals court said the rules were unambiguous, even if they might have favored Lindell.
“Whatever one might think of the logic of the panel's reasoning, it is contrary to Minnesota law. ... Fair or not, agreed-to contract terms may not be modified by the panel or by this court,” the appeals court wrote, and sent the case back to the lower court with instructions to vacate the $5 million award.
