St. Paul (US), Apr 21 (AP) An arbitration panel has ordered MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell to pay USD 5 million to a software engineer for breach of contract in a dispute over data that Lindell claims proves that China interfered in the US 2020 elections and tipped the outcome to Joe Biden.

But Lindell told The Associated Press on Thursday that he has no intention of paying and that he expects the dispute to land in court.

Also Read | IPL 2023: Sonam Kapoor, Husband Anand Ahuja Enjoy DC Vs KKR Match With Apple CEO Tim Cook (View Pics).

Lindell, a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the 2020 presidential election, launched his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge", as part of the “Cyber Symposium” he staged in South Falls, South Dakota, in August 2021, to further his theories.

Lindell offered through one of his companies a USD 5 million reward for anyone who could prove that “packet captures” and other data he released there were not valid data “from the November 2020 election”.

Also Read | BuzzFeed Layoffs: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Global Media Company To Shut Down Its News Section, To Cut Workforce by 15%, Says CEO Jonah Peretti.

Robert Zeidman entered the challenge with a 15-page report that concluded the data from Lindell did not “contain packet data of any kind and do not contain any information related to the November 2020 election”.

A panel of contest judges that included a Lindell attorney declined to declare Zeidman a winner. So Zeidman filed for arbitration under the contest rules.

After conducting an evidentiary hearing in Minneapolis in January, the three arbitrators on Wednesday ordered Lindell to pay Zeidman USD 5 million.

“He proved the data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data," the arbitrators wrote. “Failure to pay Mr. Zeidman the USD 5 million prize was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover.”

The arbitrators ordered Lindell to pay up within 30 days.

“They clearly saw this as I did — that the data we were given at the symposium was not at all what Mr. Lindell said it was,” Zeidman said in a statement on Thursday. "The truth is finally out there.”

Zeidman attorney Brian Glasser said the arbitrators' ruling marked “another important moment in the ongoing proof that the 2020 election was legal and valid,” and that Lindell's claims about the validity of his data had been "definitively disproved.”

Lindell disputed that and said he intends to release additional data in the coming weeks or months that will prove his claims of Chinese interference in the 2020 elections and validate what he put out earlier.

"It's going to end up in court,” Lindell said. “I'm not going to pay anything. ... He didn't prove anything.”

Lindell is already the subject of a USD 1.3 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems in the District of Columbia that says Lindell falsely accused the company of rigging the 2020 presidential election.

He's also the target of a separate defamation lawsuit in Minnesota by a different voting machine company, Smartmatic.

Lindell said it's strange that the arbitrators ruled a day after Dominion settled its defamation lawsuit against Fox News for nearly USD 800 million and suggested it's all an effort to get him to end his crusade against electronic voting machines.

“I'll spend everything I have to save the country I love,” Lindell said. (AP)

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)