That time MyPillow Guy and TPUSA partnered to get rid of New Hampshire voting machines
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell helped local activists contact voters by using a mobile app that was developed by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. It didn't end well.
As residents of 24 New Hampshire towns prepared to vote last spring on a warrant article that would have eliminated the use of voting machines in their communities, the leader of the grassroots group responsible for the initiative issued a call to members. “We need help making calls and texts to our 24 towns!!!” Marylyn Todd wrote in a message to supporters. “We have the most amazing [app] that makes this so easy,” she gushed.
Todd, leader of the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group, was referring to a mobile app developed by Turning Point USA, the conservative advocacy organization founded by Charlie Kirk. Re-branded as the Courage App by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an outspoken election denier and conspiracy theorist, the app promised to provide activists with the ability to contact the towns’ voters via door knocks, phone calls, and text messages.
The push for one-to-one voter contact was the culmination of a months-long campaign by the local activists. It began in January 2024, when the group identified towns that were still accepting citizen petitioned warrant articles for their upcoming town meetings. (To track their progress, the group used a Google account that was eventually shut down for violating Google’s Terms of Service.)
After successfully collecting the required signatures on petitions that would have banned the use of voting machines in 24 towns, the group launched a campaign that included a crowd-sourced fundraising appeal, a website, direct mail, and mobile billboard advertising. (Ironically, the group’s website included a link to an MIT/CalTech study of New Hampshire election data that concluded “machine counts improve on hand counts.”)
Lindell promoted the initiative to his national audience and provided the bulk of the funding for the campaign. According to a social media post by Todd, the MyPillow CEO donated $25,000 for LED billboard trucks and loaned the group more than $8,000 to help with the direct mail costs.
Lindell also provided the group with access to the Mike Lindell Courage App, which included targeted voter lists and customized campaign scripts for door-to-door canvassing, phone calls, text messaging, and mailings. The local activists prepared a training guide and video for their members, and encouraged them to use it to contact voters.
It didn’t go as planned, according to the 2024 annual report produced by Lindell’s Election Crime Bureau initiative. “The default version of Courage App was deployed as a pilot project in support of NH advocacy effort to remove the machines,” the report noted. “Text messages were blocked by phone service providers. The Courage App was subsequently dropped from the list of solutions available to activists.”
Overall, the campaign by Todd and the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group to eliminate voting machines was a spectacular failure. The initiative failed to pass in a single town as voters rejected the measures by overwhelming margins.
In a social media post, Democratic state Rep. Lucy Weber reported that her town, Walpole, had defeated the warrant article by a vote of 171-5. She pointed out that even though 25 residents signed the petition, only five voted for it. “Residents [were] overwhelmingly offended by postcards, texts, and obnoxious trucks invading town to claim, falsely, that elections are compromised,” she wrote.
(The town of Danville did vote to require a hand count just for presidential elections, but the measure was not enforced in 2024 after the town was advised that it was unlawful.)
Meanwhile, Mike Lindell’s election-denying chickens are coming home to roost. In June, a federal jury found that Lindell had defamed Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems employee, by falsely accusing him of helping to rig the 2020 presidential election. Coomer was awarded $2.3 million in damages.
Last week, a judge in Minnesota ruled that Lindell defamed Smartmatic with false statements that the election technology company’s voting machines helped rig the 2020 election. A jury will decide the damage award if it determines that Lindell acted in reckless disregard of the truth.
And if that’s not enough, a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion in 2021 seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages from Lindell and MyPillow is now making its way through the court system. “Mr. Lindell’s lies have undermined trust in American democracy and tarnished the hard work of local election officials,” said Dominion CEO John Poulos.