As the Smartmatic lawsuit looms over MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, raising concerns about his financial situation and capability to pay potential sanctions, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed him a notable victory. The court has concluded a long-standing dispute regarding a $5 million “Prove Mike Wrong” prize, once again highlighting Lindell’s involvement in controversies surrounding the 2020 election.

On Monday, the Supreme Court, in its routine order list, declined to review several cases, including the case of Robert Zeidman v. Lindell Management, LLC (LMC). The justices opted not to comment on their decision to let the lower court’s ruling stand.

This case dates back to 2021, when Lindell announced the “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge at an election fraud “Cyber Symposium” in South Dakota. He claimed to possess data that allegedly demonstrated Chinese interference in the 2020 election. Zeidman, a software developer and Trump supporter, accepted the challenge and successfully demonstrated that Lindell’s claims were unfounded, according to an arbitration panel’s decision.

Although a federal district court upheld the $5 million award in February 2024, this victory for Zeidman was short-lived.

In July, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision, noting inconsistencies in the advertised terms of the contest compared to its actual rules. The appellate court’s decision relieved Lindell of the financial obligation, emphasizing that even the district judge who supported the initial reward had reservations about the contest’s execution.

Lindell had initially promised that his team of experts would provide “cyber data and packet captures from the 2020 November election,” urging participants to “find proof that this cyber data is not valid data from the November Election.” Despite these claims, the court’s decision reveals the complexities and uncertainties surrounding the challenge.

In July, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals first took Lindell off the hook, noting that even the district judge who upheld the reward had questions about the contest as advertised versus the contest rules.

When advertising the challenge, Lindell said his team of experts would provide “cyber data and packet captures from the 2020 November election” and added that the upshot of the challenge was to “find proof that this cyber data is not valid data from the November Election.”

The “poorly written” challenge rules Zeidman signed, on the other hand, didn’t mention “packet captures.”

“[P]articipants will participate in a challenge to prove that the data Lindell provides, and represents reflects information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally does NOT reflect information related to the November 2020 election,” the rules said.

In awarding Zeidman $5 million, the arbitrators said that he [emphasis ours] “proved that each file did not include packet capture data (PCAP) and thus was not related to the November 2020 election, so he had satisfied the Challenge rules.” The 8th Circuit reached a different conclusion.

“[T]he [arbitration] panel explicitly agreed with the parties that the relevant contract terms were unambiguous, recognized that Minnesota law governed and therefore barred the use of extrinsic evidence to interpret the unambiguous provisions, and then used extrinsic evidence to rule that Zeidman won the Challenge Contest because the data [Lindell Management] provided contestants was not ‘PCAP data,’” the appellate opinion said. “Under our controlling decisions, the panel exceeded its authority.”

In sum, both the district court and the appellate court agreed that the arbitration panel used additional language outside the terms of the challenge rules themselves to interpret the contract, which circuit judges said was legally improper under Minnesota law.

“The parties agreed that the Rules are unambiguous, and Minnesota law provides that, in interpreting unambiguous contracts, the intent of the parties must be determined from the language of the contract alone without resort to extrinsic evidence,” the appeals court added. “We agree.”

Essentially, while Zeidman showed that Lindell’s data provided no support for his claims of election hacking, he failed to prove that the data was not “related” to the election in any way.

“Purporting to be interpreting the Official Rules, the [arbitration] panel determined, though ‘packet capture’ and ‘PCAP data’ are not mentioned in the Official Rules, that ‘if data is not PCAP data, it is not from the election, and it therefore cannot be ‘related to the November 2020 election,’” the 8th Circuit said. “It based this conclusion almost entirely on extrinsic evidence — Lindell’s pre-Challenge publicity describing the data and the views of experts who had analyzed the data; LMC’s advertising of the Challenge Contest; that the software engineers retained to review the data expected it to be packet capture data; and Zeidman’s report opining that the data provided ‘do not contain any information related to the November 2020 election.’”

Erstwhile challenge winner Bob Zeidman did not agree with the reversal, penning a September op-ed in Slate in which he said that the ruling was a “bad” and “harmful” one.

“Earlier this summer, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit overturned my $5 million judgment against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for having won a challenge to prove that his claims of election fraud in 2020 were nonsense. This decision is not only bad for me, but bad for America,” Zeidman said. “It upends the century-old Federal Arbitration Act and it diverts resources from legitimate investigations for improving our voting system to crazy conspiracies from wealthy plutocrats. I’m hoping the Supreme Court will reconsider this harmful ruling.”

In October, Zeidman followed through and filed his petition at the Supreme Court, asking the justices to take up one question: “Whether the Federal Arbitration Act allows a court to vacate an arbitration decision on the ground that the decision was based on a manifest disregard of the law.”

In the petition, Zeidman asserted that his was an “ideal case” for the justices to settle once and for all whether the “manifest disregard standard remains a valid basis for vacating an arbitration award” like his.

The Supreme Court has now declined to answer Zeidman’s question — something that will doubtless have the MyPillow CEO sleeping better at night.