By
Esme Murphy
Reporter/Anchor
Esme Murphy, a reporter and Sunday morning anchor for WCCO-TV, has been a member of the WCCO-TV staff since December 1990. She is also a weekend talk show host on WCCO Radio. Born and raised in New York City, Esme ventured into reporting after graduating from Harvard University.
/ CBS Minnesota
Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder who finished a distant second to Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth in the Aug. 11 Republican primary for governor, announced Wednesday that he will personally pay for a hand recount and audit of every paper ballot cast in that race.
Lindell said the effort is grounded in a right Minnesota law affords to candidates to request a full hand count of ballots even outside the narrow margin that triggers a state-funded recount.
"One of the few good election laws Minnesota does have is that as a candidate, I have the right to completely audit and hand count every ballot in the state," Lindell said in the announcement, adding that he intends to use that right "to the full extent of the law."
The move follows a lopsided loss, with the House speaker beating Lindell by roughly 11 percentage points. That gap is far outside the 0.25% threshold at which Minnesota pays for a recount automatically. A wider margin would mean that any recount would have to be requested and paid for by the candidate.
WCCO has reached out to the Secretary of State's office to determine if Lindell's campaign has formally requested a discretionary recount. Minnesota law states that "an apparent losing candidate must submit a request for a discretionary recount along with the funds to cover the cost of the recount within five days of the canvass of a primary election."
There have been no official findings of fraud or irregularity in the results. Nonetheless, on primary night, Lindell told reporters he would not concede until every vote was counted and that his team had spotted "anomalies" it needed time to review, though he offered no evidence at the time.
Lindell became a national figure after the 2020 election by promoting unproven claims that voting-machine companies had manipulated results for President Trump. Those claims led to costly legal fallout: Lindell settled a defamation suit with Dominion Voting Systems last month, and a judge separately found he had defamed Smartmatic, another voting-technology company, though damages in that case have not yet been determined.
Demuth is scheduled to face Sen. Amy Klobuchar in the Nov. 3 general election to succeed retiring Gov. Tim Walz.
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