Election Hacks - Book Tour and Giveaway

​How I disproved the 2020 "proof" of election fraud and won $5 million.
Some say I saved democracy in America. 

Election Hacks
Lindell v. Zeidman: Exposing the $5 million election myth
by Bob Zeidman
Genre: Nonfiction, Politics, Current Affairs 

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate, has been inciting crowds by publicly declaring he has proof of voting machine tampering that threw the 2020 election from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Bob Zeidman, who invented the field of software forensics, was invited by Lindell in 2021 to examine and verify the alleged proof. What he found was bogus data, manipulated results, and dangerous conspiracy theories. This is the story of Bob’s successful $5 million lawsuit against Lindell and his uncovering of a scandal leading to some of the top political leaders and advisors in America. Was the election stolen? Maybe. Maybe not. But Lindell’s bogus claims have prevented legitimate investigations into voter fraud.

Election Hacks is not just an important book about the cries of a stolen 2020 presidential election, it’s also a warning for the 2024 election and all future elections. It’s a personal story of a man who found the truth and pursued it by going up against a rich, powerful, influential businessman. It’s a technological mystery, a courtroom drama, and a character study of extremists and their enablers. It’s about human nature and how people can so easily be led astray. And it’s about standing up for the truth, even when that truth may turn out to belie your beliefs and alienate your friends.


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​Chapter 1: Election Day, 2020

I remember it being a little chilly on November 3, 2020 in Las Vegas. Maybe it wasn’t the actual temperature but rather my overall feeling about the election. And about events occurring around the country and the world. We had suffered through a global pandemic that had changed people’s lives literally overnight. My wife Carrie and I both worked out of our house, so it didn’t affect us as much as it did others. Our income had dropped significantly, but we had saved over the years. Plus the government loans had helped. It was difficult that we were covering two mortgages—one for the month-old purchase of our Las Vegas house and another for our unsold California house—but I had always been conservative in my spending as well as my politics, and I could afford to relax during the expected two weeks, then months, then more than a year that the pandemic was supposed to last.
The Black Lives Matter riots had scared us more than anything. We hadn’t felt so insecure and frightened since the Obama years, when the Occupy movements began and were tolerated by the administration, Democrat governors, and progressives around the world. When those Occupy movements came to Oakland and San Francisco, not far from our home in Cupertino, we went out and bought a handgun. We had both grown up in families that had been around guns—mine for legal uses, hers maybe not so much. Neither of us were particular fans of guns, though. In 2011, we became fans because California police were being told to stand down when confronted with rioters. And we lived in a large, isolated home in the hills of Cupertino among the high-tech wealthy.
We had moved to Las Vegas only a year and a half before the election to escape the crazy politics of California that had led to high taxes and high crime. We lived in a gated community in Summerlin, a quiet, attractive, middle-class, residential area about 15 miles northwest of The Strip. When BLM riots occurred just a mile or so away, our police stopped them immediately. But we decided to purchase a second handgun and later a shotgun. We found that our choices were limited, because the wait for a shotgun was weeks—each shotgun that came into a store went out the same day—and you had to travel around the city to find ammunition. A lot of people obviously felt the way we did.
On that election day, Carrie and I stood in line, masked of course, while some people handed out bottles of water. We made our way to the people checking our IDs and directing us to the voting machines. We both cast our ballots for Donald J. Trump for another term as President of the United States.
We didn’t like Trump as a person, and we were open about it. Before the 2016 election, I had written an article entitled, “Trump is an incompetent, sexist, thin-skinned, unethical bully... but I’m voting for him.” The long title was cut off in most links, so some progressive friends read only the first part and thanked me for writing it, obviously never having actually clicked on the link. The article was about how I disliked both Trump and Hillary Clinton. I had followed Trump’s business dealings for years, and even had a very minor involvement in one of them, and noted how most people in his deals got screwed, except for him who always somehow came out with a windfall gain. Carrie and I were fans of his TV show The Apprentice, but the appeal wasn’t his alleged business acumen but rather his mercurial temperament where he would fire anyone—not just contestants but also longtime employees—for saying anything that contradicted him. This was not the man I wanted to run our great country.
I didn’t like Trump and didn’t trust him, but I didn’t like or trust Hillary either. I believed, though, that the Republicans would keep an eye on Trump and keep him in line, or at least attempt to do so. Already, prominent Republicans were criticizing him during the campaign.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, always seemed to get a pass from a strongly united Democratic Party. Her shady dealings throughout her lifetime were always dismissed by her fellow Democrats. No matter 2 what suspicious things she did—her scrubbing of government emails, the Whitewater scandal, the Clinton Foundation dealings, or her handling of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya resulting in the murder of four U.S. diplomats—the Democrats shielded her from criticism and deflected blame just as they did for Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Of the two candidates, Trump was the lesser of two evils. At the time, I knew Clinton’s political stances and hated them. I wasn’t sure of Trump’s, but they couldn’t be worse than Clinton’s.
By the year 2020, up until the COVID pandemic, I was certain Trump would win reelection. Despite his boorish personality and childish tweets, he had turned the country in a great direction. The economy was solid. Our foreign enemies feared us, and our allies appreciated us. Immigration was more controlled and lawful. Crime was down and employment was up. Things were looking good. You just had to ignore the mainstream press and the words coming out of Trump’s own mouth.
Then COVID hit. The lockdowns occurred. America needed a comforting father figure to reassure them. We needed Ronald Reagan. Or even Bill Clinton. Instead we got Donald Trump’s thin-skinned vitriol. Every insult, no matter how trivial from any insignificant source, drove him into a childish display of anger and tantrums. As always, I thought his policies were right (though I later came to decide that indiscriminate lockdowns and injections were very wrong, but we didn’t know better at the time), but his attitude was wrong.
The psychological frustration of the lockdown, fueled by the death of George Floyd, seemed to lead to widespread insanity. When the violent BLM riots began, every major Democratic politician not just accepted these violent uprisings but supported them. They not only backed defunding the police, but they even justified attacks on police. Progressive friends argued that Republicans not wearing masks were killing everyone in America and at the same time said that unmasked protesters, destroying billions of dollars of property and threatening innocent people, were standing up for social justice and against white supremacy. Critical race theory taught that whites were bad and blacks were perpetual victims. For decades, a man wearing a dress was considered at best a funny jokester or at worst a delusional person who needed help. Suddenly he was a member of a protected minority group. And children were being encouraged to have surgery and take drugs because the liberals who once promoted the idea that you should love yourself as you are, suddenly did a 180 degree turn to promote hating who you are and changing it through irreversible surgery and drugs. The world had gone nuts.
When the dust had cleared at the Democratic primaries, I couldn’t believe the result. The least competent person had somehow survived. Joe Biden was considered a joke by most serious political pundits, even those on the left. He was a known plagiarist and liar, his political views were too moderate for the extreme leftists who had so much influence on the modern Democratic Party. He was an “old white man,” the very kind of person that even moderate Democrats had been railing against. And he had obvious moments of mental incoherency during his campaign. After his nomination, he stayed at home, rarely giving public rallies. When he did, they were sparsely attended. His few media interviews were done remotely, under the pretext of COVID, but obviously done to limit his tendency to ramble incoherently, as came out when some of his handlers’ remarks and notes got caught on camera.
Through all this insanity, I thought that America would once again vote for Donald Trump. He was an imperfect person—very much so—but he got good things done. And the Democrats had gone off the deep end, as made clear by their incompetent presidential candidate who had already badly lost two previous bids for president.
Nevada was clearly going for Trump. In the restaurants, in the casinos, and even in my synagogue, when mention of the election came up, Trump was almost always the preferred candidate. I took a Lyft ride from the airport, and the driver asked me who I was voting for, something that I would religiously avoid in California where non-progressive views were the subject of ridicule at best and violence at worst. But here in Nevada, I felt comfortable voicing my opinions. I told him Trump, and he said Trump was going to win overwhelmingly. I asked him how he knew. He said he had maybe a dozen riders a day from all walks of life. He asked everyone that question for months, and almost all of them said Trump.
So on that election day, Carrie and I were, as they say, “cautiously optimistic.” Carrie had volunteered at a Trump rally that February where he filled the Las Vegas Convention Center with thousands of supporters, and there were still lines to get in. People enthusiastically interrupted Trump every few minutes with applause and cheering.
On that chilly day in November, I felt confident that Nevada would go red, but wasn’t sure about the rest of the country. As the results came in from around the country later that day, it looked like another four years to make America great again. But I had a bad feeling when I went to bed, a premonition I guess, and when I woke up early, my premonition had been right. Major states had switched from overwhelming Trump majorities to thin Biden majorities. When the ballots were counted and certified some days later, I felt sick to find that Biden had even won Nevada.
On January 6, a rally of Trump supporters outside the U.S. Capitol Building turned dangerous when the people entered the building, chanting, rummaging, breaking, and stealing. Four Trump supporters died that day. Five police officers died shortly afterwards. Trump delayed sending out a message to calm the crowd, instead insisting that Vice President Mike Pence not certify the vote, something he couldn’t constitutionally do. We can argue about what happened that day and who was responsible, but I hope we agree it was a tragic and probably preventable event. I had been invited by my friends to attend that rally to protest the election, but I sensed that it wasn’t going to turn out well, so I declined. It just seemed like a bad idea and a potentially dangerous situation.
On January 20, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. Donald Trump didn’t attend, the first outgoing president not to attend the swearing in of his successor in over a century. Trump had insisted the election had been stolen from him. There are many people in this country who believe the same thing, and you’ll meet some of the most ardent ones in this story.
​Rumors of cheating and fraud abounded among my Republican friends. As a software forensics expert, I got calls and emails from many friends, begging me to get involved. They wanted me to inspect the voting machines. So I contacted all of my friends and acquaintances in Republican politics, including some who had been advisors to Trump, and volunteered my services and that of my experienced team. None got back to me. I told my friends that I was sure they had already selected a team of top-notch software forensics and cybersecurity experts, ready immediately to perform the inspections. While my team and I are, in my opinion and that of many others, the best in the world at examining electronics and software, there are many others who can also do a competent job. I assumed they had contracted one of those other teams. Boy was I wrong.
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Bob Zeidman is an inventor, author, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and high-stakes poker player. He created the field of software forensics and founded Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation to develop and sell software forensics tools. He is the founder of Zeidman Consulting, an engineering consulting company that has worked on over 260 major litigations involving billions of dollars of disputed intellectual property. His cases have included ConnectU v. Facebook, on which the Oscar-winning movie The Social Network is based, and Oracle v. Google that went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. He is the inventor of the famous Silicon Valley Napkin on display at the Computer History Museum. He is also a high-stakes poker player, and his latest tech venture is Good Beat Poker, a new way to play and watch poker online.

Bob writes about politics, society, and business for national magazines. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news and $5 million.

Bob has a master's degree from Stanford University and two bachelor's degrees from Cornell University.


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Can you, for those who don't know you already, tell something about yourself and how you became an author?

I’ve been writing since I was a teenager. I had teenage angst, and I needed the catharsis of putting it on a page. I also liked the idea of creating my own universe where I could control what happened. I also liked technology, so I was initially attracted to science fiction. I hand wrote some pages of my first novel. I showed the draft to a girl I liked. She was impressed and we started dating, so I immediately saw the advantages of being a writer. However, when I got to a few dozen pages, I read the story and was bored; it wasn’t going anywhere interesting, so I tore it up and gave up writing until after college. Then, I decided to apply to my writing the organizational techniques I’d developed as an engineer. I outlined the entire story and wrote character backgrounds before I wrote the first word of the novel. When I didn’t like a chapter, I could pull it out and rewrite it. Or if I decided to go in a different direction, I could change the outline. This worked a lot better.

On long drives back from relatives in northern California to the San Francisco Bay Area, my young son would get very restless. To keep him occupied, I would make up stories for him. He liked one so much that I turned it into my first novel, The Amazing Adventure of Edward and Dr. Sprechtmachen.


What is something unique/quirky about you?

I don’t have hobbies, I have obsessions. Writing is one of those obsessions. When I decide to do something, I want to be the best or there’s no point in attempting it.


Tell us something really interesting that's happened to you!

I won $5 million in the Prove Mike Wrong Challenge, which is what the book is about. Mike Lindell claimed he had proof that the 2020 election was hacked by China to swing the vote from Trump to Biden. He invited leading cyber experts to review the data and offered $5 million to anyone who could prove that the data was not related to the 2020 election. I got myself invited, surprised myself by proving it within 3 hours of arriving, and submitted my detailed 15-page report with thousands of pages of exhibits. Lindell ignored my report, so I took him to arbitration where the unanimous decision was that he owes me the money. I’m still trying to collect.

Another interesting thing is that I play high-stakes poker. It started with a friendly, monthly game with some friends. About ten years ago, I came to Las Vegas for the Annual Convention of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Every year, they hold a poker tournament, and this was my very first tournament in Las Vegas. Two poker superstars, Daniel Negreanu (AKA “Kid Poker”) and Barry Greenstein were invited to play. Before the tournament, we were all taking pictures with them, when I half-jokingly asked Negreanu for a tip to win the tournament. I was surprised when he pulled me aside and furtively asked, “Do you want to go as far as you can, or do you really want to win.” I looked at him blankly for a minute. I said, “I want to win.” He said, “When your stack is less than 10 big blinds, you’ve got to shove.” I thought I’d had just received some secret, insider advice. It turns out that every regular tournament player knows this. But I didn’t. So when my stack got low, I waited for a decent hand, and shoved my entire stack into the middle. And it actually worked! I ended up with the first tournament win of my career, beating the two superstars and everyone else. To this day, it’s one of the most exciting days of my life and my most thrilling tournament win ever. Since then, I’ve won two major tournaments and cashed in many others, though I’ve hit a bad streak for the past year or so.

I was programming computers at the age of 13, more than 50 years ago, in Philadelphia. I always wanted to be in the San Francisco Bay Area (before it was called “Silicon Valley”) to be creating the future with my heroes. In school, I had looked forward to each issue of the People’s Computer Company newsletter out of Menlo Park, California, and even became a contributor, writing letters and occasional articles. Years later, I was excited to study at Stanford and made Silicon Valley my home. I few years back, I found that I was one of the few people in the world who actually kept copies of this early computer newspaper. I scanned my issues and donated those scans to the Computer History Museum. In proofreading the issues, I came across a letter that I’d written that was published:

 Lee Felsenstein is a computer pioneer, having designed some of the first personal computers and mentored Steve Wozniak (see Lee Felsenstein - Wikipedia). I had become friends with him after moving to Silicon Valley. When I saw this letter, I sent him an email that said, “I realize that it’s forty years late, but I could still use those instructions for the Pennywhistle Modem.”

In the early days of my expert witness career, I got a call from Neel Chatterjee, a lawyer at Orrick Herrington, a big Silicon Valley law firm, about a major software copyright case. He asked if I could compare large amounts of code effectively and in a reasonable amount of time. I told him yes, but it would be expensive, as I needed to charge not only for my time but for the use of my software forensics tools. Cost wasn’t a problem, he told me, something I’d never heard before from a lawyer. Accuracy and completeness were the problems, and I assured him I’d already solved those problems. I was hired. I got off the phone and rushed to tell my wife that I had just gotten what promised to be the most lucrative contract of my career. There was only one problem. I had no idea whether my client could pay its bills. I asked her, “Have you ever heard of a company called The Facebook?”

I was hired onto this case, made famous by the Oscar-winning movie The Social Network by my favorite screenwriter of all time, Aaron Sorkin. Remember the scene where Jessie Eisenberg, playing Mark Zuckerberg, holds papers in the air and says to the Winklevoss twins that he didn’t steal their code? I like to joke that if you zoom in on the papers in his hands, you’ll see my name. In the actual case, the Winklevoss twins and their company ConnectU hired a team of experts from a well-respected consulting firm to compare the code from both companies. These experts issued a report that out of 99,000 files, it was impossible to examine all combinations of files for signs of copying, but they had examined 4,000 files. They had not yet found copying but asked for more time from the court to compare the rest of the files.

At the same time, I issued a report that said using CodeMatch, the software forensics tool I had developed, I was able to compare all 99,000 files in all combinations and found not a single indication of copying. The case settled shortly after that. Thus was born the field of software forensics.


Where were you born/grew up at?

I lived my first 12 years in the Mount Airy section of North Philadelphia before moving to Northeast Philly. I left for Cornell in upstate New York at age 17. I went to Stanford in California for grad school at age 21. I remained there until 2019 when I moved to Las Vegas to escape the rising taxes and falling standard of living.


What are you passionate about these days?

Poker. I write a blog called Good Beat Poker (Bracelet Quest). Playing in a poker tournament is like starting a business, compressed into one or several days. You take risks, you make decisions based on probabilities and incomplete knowledge, and in the end, you win or lose. Except starting a business can take a year or more to find out if you won or lost.

In many activities, you’re judged by other people who determine whether you succeed. For example, my book can win an award in a competition if enough judges like it but lose if it’s just not what they’re looking for. It’s subjective. Poker is objective. At the end of the tournament, the person with the most chips wins. Period. Even if no one likes you or thinks you’re a good player. I’m also starting an online poker site called Good Beat Poker that should be launching very soon. I have four issued patents on the technology.

I’m also passionate about fixing society. I think we’re heading in a direction that is abandoning the values that made our country strong and our civilization successful. I contribute my time and money to organizations that are trying to fix things. I’m a Policy Fellow at the Nevada Policy Research Institute (see Bob Zeidman, Nevada Policy). And I write a blog called the Good Intentions Newsletter about society’s problems and what I think needs to be done. Many of my articles are published in national publications.


What do you do to unwind and relax?

I don’t really unwind and relax, but I do things to shift my mental focus. I play poker. I write articles. I write computer programs. I exercise three times a week. I watch TV and movies. And I go to services at my synagogue on Saturdays. That’s the one place where I meditate on life and give myself a chance to acquire calmness.

Describe yourself in 5 words or less!
Obsessive, creative, and hard-working.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I’ve been writing for a long time, but I never considered myself a writer because I never got much distribution and rarely got paid. Then I got paid for some articles, but it was only a little amount. Then I wrote some successful textbooks on engineering and got paid. And more importantly, people contacted me to tell me how much my textbooks had helped them. I even got a pen pal in China who had used my textbook in college. He showed my wife and me around when we visited Beijing a few years back. Still, I would call myself “someone who wrote” but not “a writer.” I guess when I wrote my first novel, The Amazing Adventure of Edward and Dr. Sprechtmachen, I officially called myself a writer. Now that I’ve gotten paid and won awards for writing three (unproduced) screenplays, four novels, five textbooks, one autobiographical work of nonfiction, and hundreds of articles, I proudly call myself a writer. Among other things.


Do you have a favorite movie?

My favorite movie is Fail Safe, a frighteningly realistic portrayal of nuclear war. The acting, cinematography, and storytelling were amazing. I used to stay up late watching late-night movies on TV in my youth. Back in those days, the selections were limited. I came across Fail Safe at about twelve years old, and it frightened and fascinated me. I would scour the TV Guide each week to try to find it again.

Which of your novels can you imagine being made into a movie?

All of them. I turned Horror Flick into a screenplay. I won prestigious awards for the novel and the screenplay but could never find a producer interested enough to option it. It’s a really fun story. Producers and directors have contacted me over the years to tell me how much they liked my screenplays, but it just wasn’t the right time or material for them. At least that’s what they said. I’d love to see Election Hacks turned into a movie. I think it’s the right time for this. I’d love to work with my favorite screenwriter/director Aaron Sorkin or my other favorite director Christopher Nolan, but I’ll happily consider others, too. If either of you read this, please contact me!

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Dec 29
kickoff at Silver Dagger Book Tours
FUONLYKNEW
Painting With Words

Jan 1
The Sexy Nerd 'Revue'
Book Bites....with a side of coffee

Jan 2
J.M. Northrup

Jan 3
Plain Talk Book Marketing – GUEST POST
Twisted Book Ramblings

Jan 4
Haley Cavanagh Books

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All The Write Stuff
Inside the Insanity – GUEST POST

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Naughty Nightie Book Blog
Kenyan Poet

Jan 9
Karen J. Mossman

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Book Reviews by the Reluctant Retiree
Sylv.net

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I'm Into Books

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Bedazzled By Books
Literary Gold

Jan 15
Books all things paranormal and romance
Momma Says: To Read or Not to Read

Jan 16
C.A.Milson

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Celticlady's Reviews
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Country Mamas With Kids

Jan 19
Craving Lovely Books
My beauty my books

Jan 22
eBook Addicts
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Girl with Pen

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Insane Books
Royally Insane Books

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Midnight Book Reader

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Scrupulous Dreams
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Jan 29
The Book Dragon
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