One of President Donald Trump’s most vocal election deniers has missed the deadline to contest his own humiliating loss in Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary.
Trump had endorsed Mike Lindell—who owes tens of thousands of dollars in legal damages and fees for spreading lies about Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden—in this month’s primary, only for the MyPillow founder to lose by 11 points.
Lindell received a resounding 45,000 fewer votes than the winner, Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, but vowed last week to request a recount based on unspecified “anomalies” that he claimed his team had uncovered.
Under Minnesota law, candidates who lose by more than 0.25 percent of the vote can request a recount within five days of the official vote tally, but they have to foot the bill.
The Minnesota Secretary of State’s office prepared a recount plan on Aug. 18 that was estimated to cost Lindell $825,000, and set Monday as the deadline to formally submit the request and post a “bond, cash or surety” for payment.
But Lindell has since blown past that deadline, according to a statement from his campaign—even as he continues to solicit donations to fund a recount.
The campaign claimed an $825,000 wire transfer was “primed and ready,” but said it was withholding the payment because the secretary of state’s office had attempted an “unlawful bait and switch.”
The plan called for recounting the votes received by Lindell and Demuth, according to the statement, while the campaign wanted a recount of every single vote cast in both the Aug. 11 Democratic and Republican gubernatorial primaries.
“In addition to being a violation of Minnesota state law, the anomalies in election night identified by Mike Lindell’s team show an algorithm that applies to ALL of the candidates,” the campaign said.
Demuth will face off against Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar in November.
Lindell, who claimed “Satan” rigged voting machines during the 2020 election, did not provide any evidence or details about the supposed irregularities. The Daily Beast has reached out for comment.
The campaign said it was “taking immediate legal action” and asking the state to pause its Monday deadline until a court could rule on the recount plan.
Cassondra Knudson, a spokesperson for Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, told CBS News in a statement, “Our office provided the contingent recount plan to Mr. Lindell after it was approved by the State Canvassing Board on Aug. 18. The plan follows state law and administrative rules on recount procedures, and is consistent with plans of its kind for the past two decades.”
A day after the plan was released, Lindell vowed to NBC News that he would “personally go in there myself” to submit the request.
He also bragged that he was willing to spend more than the state’s estimated $825,000 so he could hire his own designated investigators and recount observers, bringing the total to “upwards of $1 million.”
But Lindell, 65, has a history of not paying his bills.
In July, Minnesota Reformer reported he owed about $48,000 in unpaid property taxes.
He owes the voting machine company Smartmatic $56,369 after a jury found him liable for defamation, and as of late July, he had racked up another $56,500 and counting in fines for failing to pay.
He told the court in January that he didn’t have the money to pay Smartmatic, despite his campaign spending $187,000 to buy his own books and finance other legal proceedings, NBC News reported.
Lawyers defending Lindell against lawsuits brought by Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems quit in 2023 over millions of dollars in unpaid legal fees, Reuters reported.
In June 2025, a jury awarded Eric Coomer, a former director at Dominion, a $2.3 million judgment against Lindell, who said at the time he was millions of dollars in debt.
Last month, Lindell and Dominion—which was bought by a former GOP election official and renamed Liberty Vote—reached a “confidential settlement” in a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit brought by the company.
