SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) – A Nevada man and software development expert won a $5 million contest regarding the 2020 Presidential election announced during Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium held in Sioux Falls in August 2021.  

The “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” was a contest created by Lindell Management, LLC and required participants to sign contest rules in Sioux Falls. On Thursday, CNN first reported Robert Zeidman won the $5 million contest and Lindell was ordered by a private arbitrator to pay the money in a 23-page decision from the American Arbitration Association published by The Washington Post.

Those documents say Zeidman was vetted by Lindell LLC and got an invitation to the Sioux Falls-based symposium. The documents also say for not paying Zeidman for winning the contest, “Lindell LLC violated the Minnesota Consumer Fraud Act.” 

Zeidman told KELOLAND News Thursday he wasn’t planning to come to Sioux Falls for the event but some friends helped convince him. It was Zeidman’s first time being in South Dakota and he said he liked his visit to the state.

“I got myself an invitation, flew to Sioux Falls, went to the conference. The first thing that struck me is how disorganized it was. There was no agenda,” said Zeidman, who described himself as conservative Republican. “I was able to reverse engineer what they had done and realized that all this data was fake.”

Zeidman documented his trip to Sioux Falls on social media and in a published article on his LinkedIn page. In his article published on August 13, 2021, two days after the Cyber Symposium, Zeidman said he went to his hotel room in Sioux Falls and called his wife saying, “You should start thinking about how you want to spend five million dollars.”

After Lindell said Zeidman did not win the contest, he filed arbitration which released its ruling Wednesday after evidentiary hearings were held Jan. 17-19, 2023 in Minneapolis. 

Zeidman even registered a copyright to his 15-page report proving Lindell’s data was not related to the November 2020 election. 

“The data Lindell provides, and represents reflects information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally does not contain packet data of any kind and do not contain any information related to the November 2020 election,” Zeidman’s report stated.

Zeidman received 11 types of data files cited in the arbitrator decision. He said some of the data was encrypted and encoded but would then turnout to be a word document or a big spreadsheet. 

“Lindell himself said he wanted to get this out to the public to prove that China had hacked into our election system,” Zeidman said. “If you’re going to prove that China hacked into the election system, why would you encrypt it and decode it? They did all this manipulation to it so that nobody could know what it was.”

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Lindell, CEO of My Pillow and outspoken critic of the 2020 election, told The Hill Thursday he plans to fight the decision. 

“It was a horrible decision, and it is all going to end up in court,” Lindell told The Hill. 

Zeidman is now planning to write a book about the whole process. He said he doesn’t believe he’ll ever see the $5 million from the “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” because he believes Lindell has bigger issues to worry about with a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems. 

“I think he’s going to delay paying me,” Zeidman said. “Dominion, I think, is probably going to win their lawsuit against him.”

Just this week, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to avert a trial in the voting machine company’s lawsuit that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election.

If he does receive $5 million, Zeidman said he’d like to resume donations to non-profit organizations which he stopped because of this lawsuit. He said he’d like to donate to a “voter integrity, non-profit, that is looking into voter integrity issues and fraud issues.”  

Zeidman said he believes some people are believing Lindell “blindly.” 

“It’s causing havoc. They believe that Biden is not our true president,” Zeidman said. “He’s not helping anybody.” 

Zeidman said he’s been an expert witness on 260 cases worldwide and he believes the American judicial system has flaws. 

“Justice does not always come out in the end. However, it’s better than any other system in the world,” Zeidman said. “In our system, the little guy can go after the big guys and make a difference. It doesn’t always work. You’ve got to have the right lawyers, you’ve got to have the tenacity to keep going. Most of the time, wrongs are righted. I think we should really appreciate the system we have here.”

In South Dakota, Lindell’s Cyber Symposium sparked the creation of the South Dakota Canvassing Group. That group has had members testify about election fraud in South Dakota at numerous state and county meetings. The group also played a role in the Tripp County decision to hand count ballots for the 2022 election.

During the 2023 Legislative Session, members of the group testified on numerous bills related to South Dakota’s elections. In a Feb. 15 Senate State Affairs Committee, Republican Sen. Lee Schoenbeck, the Senate President Pro Tempore, called the South Dakota Canvassing Group’s election concerns “some kind of an obsession or fetish.” 

In a statement to KELOLAND News, Mike Mathis with the South Dakota Canvassing Group said Lindell’s Cyber Symposium just happened to be hosted in Sioux Falls around the same time the group formed.

“The purpose and goals of the group were not to overturn the election or get Trump back into office, as some have claimed, but rather to simply find out about South Dakota elections and what we could improve on,” Mathis said.