July 18, 2022 11:58 AM UTC

"MyPillow Guy" Fails To Intervene For Hanks, Peters

• 8 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Last week, as readers know, two defeated Republican candidates who had run for higher office this year more or less on single-issue campaigns to relitigate the 2020 presidential election, Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and state Rep. Ron Hanks, requested recounts in the races they both lost by substantial margins alleging that the result had been corrupted in some respect. Colorado law provided for recounts in very narrow races paid for by the state, otherwise the cost of a recount is borne by the requesting candidate.

As AP’s Nick Riccardi reports:

Hanks was outspent 14-to-1 by his rival. Peters, who was vying to become Colorado’s top elections official, had been indicted on seven felony charges alleging she helped orchestrate a breach of her voting system’s hard drive.

But this past week, both candidates formally requested recounts of their primary elections from June 28, suggesting widespread irregularities seen by no one other than their own campaigns and allies…

The Secretary of State’s office as required by law compiled an estimate from all 64 counties in Colorado and delivered it to the campaigns with a deadline of 5:00PM last Friday. A deadline that came and went:

The Colorado Secretary of State’s office said a recount will cost $236,000 for each candidate. As of Friday night, the deadline set by the office to receive the money, neither candidate had paid, according to spokeswoman Annie Orloff.

Given that the cost of a recount was more than either candidate raised for their entire campaign, the only possible lifeline to keep hope alive for Hanks and Peters would have been large checks from “MyPillow Guy” Mike Lindell. Lindell at one point claimed to have contributed some $800,000 for Peters’ “legal defense fund,” and that money hasn’t been seized or spent that we know of. Wouldn’t a recount that validated Peters’ contention she did not lose by 80,000 votes help out Peters’ legal defense in her election system tampering case?

The much more likely scenario is that Lindell, for all his fact-challenged bluster and vows to throw untold amounts of money at his new life’s mission to prove the 2020 elections were stolen from Donald Trump, didn’t have $470,000 worth of confidence in Hanks’ and Peters’ insistence that their elections were stolen too. Or, Lindell doesn’t have a disposable $470,000 lying around like he used to.

Either way, Hanks’ and Peters’ diehard supporters–much like Trump’s–don’t need the additional proof a recount would provide, and given the likely result confirming their defeats down to the very last precinct, they might not want one. When you’ve already made up your mind, unless the proof is what you wanted, proof just gets in the way.

Unproven yet unrefuted, the myth of still more “stolen elections” can now live on forever.