MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell in 2020 at an event in Phoenix. /Photo by Gage Skidmore | CC BY-SA 2.0
By Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
Fantastical and baseless claims of voter fraud made in a video last week by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell are the basis for a series of public records requests two Republican state legislators have filed with elections officials across Arizona.
In an email to supporters of his campaign for secretary of state, Rep. Mark Finchem claimed that Lindell’s recent internet video provided enough “probable cause” to “begin an inquiry” into ballot images from multiple counties across the state. ooml
The Lindell video, “Absolutely 9-0,” claims that Chinese hackers switched votes from Joe Biden to Donald Trump, among other dubious and false claims. Finchem wrote in his newsletter that he and Rep. Leo Biasiucci, R-Lake Havasu City, have requested “ballot printing order records” from Apache, Pima, Pinal and Yuma counties, as well as ballot images from Pima County, due to the “revelation” from Lindell’s video.
However, Lindell’s video does not prove anything.
It features an anonymous “hacker” who claims that a wall of scrolling text are alleged PCAP files. PCAP files — the name is short for packet capture — hold data captured from a network in the form of a packet, which is a small segment of a larger message.
PCAPs are helpful for people who want to analyze their network traffic to see what devices are using it the most or to see if someone else may be on it. Capturing and reading the packets requires the use of special software.
But the data shown in Lindell’s video does not appear to be from a PCAP at all, but publicly available voter information that has been translated into hexadecimal digits. The PCAPs in the video look nothing like real world examples.
