Duluth, MN – Minnesota Republican delegates arrived for the party’s state convention on Thursday, May 28, to pick which gubernatorial candidate will receive the party’s endorsement ahead of the August 11 primary election.

Eight candidates lined up on the stage in the AMSOIL Arena of the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center in the Duluth Harbor. Before them, thousands of red folding chairs formed dense rows on the cement floor with signs hanging overhead marking each section based on the geographic origin of the seated delegates. Above those, campaign ads hung from the rafters.

Campaign pamphlets were stacked neatly on each chair, with one bizarre addition: MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s 2019 memoir What are the Odds? From Crack Addict to CEO. A sticker on the bottom left corner of each copy’s holographic cover explained they were “paid for by Mike Lindell for Governor.”

To fill each seat, the campaign would have had to purchase roughly 2,400 copies for this event alone, which would only be a small fraction of the total number of copies the campaign has purchased since Lindell announced his candidacy on Dec. 11, 2025. Roughly 22% of all of the money spent by all eight official Republican gubernatorial campaign committees this year has gone toward purchasing copies of Lindell’s memoir, according to the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board.

That’s nearly $250,000 funneled into Lindell’s personal company with the sole purpose of purchasing copies of his memoir.

That number is only a glimpse at the relative enormity of Lindell’s spending so far, which accounts for almost half of all spending by Republican candidate campaign committees.

That Lindell has such a large war chest in the first place is no surprise. His national profile and position in President Donald Trump’s orbit give him immense pull among MAGA-aligned voters. This explains his ability to quickly double the fundraising of establishment-favorite House Speaker Lisa Demuth and dwarf that of perennial candidate Kendall Qualls.

Spending, however, ultimately did not correlate with victory in the endorsement contest. Qualls won on the tenth ballot against Demuth, and Lindell was dropped after the fourth.

While MyPillow is the largest benefactor of Lindell’s campaign cash, the second largest is an obscure computer service company in St. Bonifacius, Minnesota, and Brookings, South Dakota, called R & G Visions.

A cursory glance at their website will feel like you’re looking into a time capsule. The design has seen few updates in nearly three decades, according to archived versions in the Wayback Machine and includes animated clipart emojis from the 1990s.

That underscores just how much money the Lindell campaign has been able to throw around, having spent more than $535,000 in the lead-up to the state convention.

R & G Visions is owned by election conspiracy theorist, self-professed nerd and Lindell for Governor’s campaign manager, Rick Weible. Weible, whose X profile refers to himself as an “Election Integrity Expert” and has appeared several times on Lindell’s news network, LindellTV, and even hosted the network in Lindell’s absence.

Weible, the former mayor of St. Bonifacius – coincidentally also where Lindell’s campaign is based – and state GOP operative, has been paid $32,000 in the past six months for his role on the campaign, and his company R & G Visions has been paid more than $200,000 for services foreign to computer consultation businesses, like legal services and security.

While Lindell runs a campaign focused heavily on election security – an obvious focus for one of the leading figures of Trump’s 2020 election denial – the campaign committee has doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars that have gone directly into the pockets of the two people running it. 

Weible, an outspoken critic of election integrity on a much smaller scale, is right alongside Lindell setting up the scaffolding that will allow them to deny the legitimacy of the elections taking place in Minnesota later this year. He’s been up to similar activities in Ward County, South Dakota lately and has been criticizing South Dakota Republicans about election technology for years.

Weible did not respond for comment when contacted by Unicorn Riot.

R & G Visions

If you’re looking for computer services and your city appears in a long list that repeats itself, you’re in luck: R & G Visions offers affordable services in the area.

The information displayed on the website changes depending on which page of the extremely dated website you’re looking at. While the landing page shows the copyright date as 2023, most other pages show 2017.

Despite the business’s promise that its “small size affords us the ability to respond quickly to our clients,” an email sent by Unicorn Riot purporting to be an interested customer was never responded to.

If you wanted to visit them in person, the website lists two addresses, one in St. Bonifacius, Minnesota, and another in Brookings, South Dakota.

The St. Bonifacius location is actually the address of the local United States Postal Service office with a P.O. Box number, so there is no physical location for the business. Unicorn Riot attempted to call the location with the unique phone number listed, but it was bounced to a full voicemail box.

The South Dakota location is actually the address of South Dakota State University’s Brookings Innovation Center, which is essentially an office park with 40 tenants, including companies like General Mills and Ducks Unlimited. R & G Visions is not included on this list, and a perusal of archived versions on the Wayback Machine similarly do not include the computer service business.

Unicorn Riot attempted to call the South Dakota location, but was immediately met by a dial tone.

On other pages of the website, the address provided is a completely different one in St. Bonifacius, a residential home that has long since been vacated by the Weible family.

Is there an actual address for this business?

The business is not findable in aggregated corporate records or even the Minnesota Secretary of State’s business filings, but it is easily found through the South Dakota Secretary of State’s office. Determined customers who have thus far refused to take the previous dead ends for an answer will be led to the current Weible residence in a small community outside of Brookings, a single-level country home with a Trump flag flying high in the front lawn on Google Maps.

Could this be the very location Weible broadcasts from while filling in for Lindell on his broadcasts, a cluttered room with piles of this and that behind him accentuated by the odd piece of Trump merchandise, including a poster that directly references the 2020 election fraud claims?

What could a business such as this possibly be providing the Lindell campaign?

The campaign has paid R & G Visions $144,816.37 for the purpose of advertising alone, according to receipts made available by Minnesota’s Campaign Finance Board. Most of that, nearly $120,000, has supposedly gone toward text messages.

R & G Visions’ share plus the amount going to MyPillow brings the sum spent on advertising to $392,000, or about 73% of the campaign’s total expenditures. In comparison, the Demuth campaign has only spent $6,000 on advertising.

While not entirely representative of all money spent on advertising, Demuth’s advertising spending has purchased her eight ads on Facebook, which cumulatively reached hundreds of thousands of impressions, according to Meta’s ad library. The only ads run on Facebook related to Lindell are DFL attack ads.

Another $42,335.09 of the campaign’s money was given to the computer service business for the purpose of candidate security.

Oftentimes, the business serves merely as a middleman for other third-party payees, listing the genuine payee under the purpose section, such as a $2,000 payment from the campaign to R & G Visions that then went to “EQUINOX DYNAMICS” for internet access and web hosting.

U.S. Council on Accurate and Secure Elections

Weible is also the president of the non-profit organization called the U.S. Council on Accurate and Secure Elections (USCASE), which lists his wife and son as the only other members, who both contribute in their capacity as the vice presidents of the group.

Similar to his computer service business, USCASE also leads back to Weible’s South Dakota home.

The organization’s 2024 tax return document states its purpose as providing “independent unbiased evaluation, research, and recommendations for improvements on the election process including counting and tabulation of ballots as well as security methods around the entire election processes.”

Most of USCASE’s output concerns casting doubt on the electoral process and advocating for paper ballots and hand counting, causes which Lindell has spent nearly $20 million on through his Lindell Legal Offense Fund and the Election Crime Bureau between 2021 and 2024.

Its tax return also lists under its accomplishments that the organization worked with the Wyoming Secretary of State to issue new election instructions and guidance. Wyoming’s HB0052 (“Elections-hand counting for recounts”) directly references the organization and its “Election Gold Star White Paper” as the basis for new rules around recounts. As of May 27, 2026, the bill has not advanced past the state senate.

The council’s most recent report, titled 2026 Virus Election Risks, is a two-page PDF that displays a chart of election software and adds two extra columns on the left that claim, without any substantiation, that none of them have had Windows or anti-virus software updates. The second page is just a graph from AV Atlas estimating the amount of malware in the world.

A perusal of the council’s website reveals a conspicuous connection with the Lindell campaign. On its landing page, the group has organized the auction of an original portrait of Mike Lindell titled Courage for Revival by the painter Ray Simon, apparently appraised for a fair market value of $500,000.

“Step into a vision of faith, courage, and spiritual resolve with ‘Courage for Revival,’ a striking piece that captures unwavering trust in divine purpose and the enduring values that define that American spirit,” the painting’s description reads. “This powerful artwork by Ray Simon portrays Mike Lindell standing form in conviction, embodying faith-driven resilience in a world that constantly tests it.”

Reminiscent of 9/11-era patriotic fervor, the painting includes a smiling Lindell fading into a city’s skyline, the State Capitol emerging from his right, just above a soaring bald eagle, while a male lion rests in the bottom-right corner.

The painting debuted at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year in an official Lindell campaign event that cost $134,657.17, making the President’s exclusive golf resort one of the biggest recipients of Lindell’s campaign cash.

Ray Simon, who attended the event, bills himself as “a contemporary American artist working in the tradition of the great European allegorical painters.” Simon compares his work to that of Michaelangelo, Caravaggio, Pieter Bruegel and Peter Paul Rubens, whose works served as “visual texts to educated people often unable to read for themselves.”

Another example of his work is a QAnon-flavored portrait of President Trump titled “The Awakening: The Best is Yet to Come.”

Thus far, “Wes S.” is the only person to have placed a bid on the Lindell painting, wagering $10,000 on the pleasure to own such a piece of history.

Two months before the state convention, Weible appeared on an extremely niche Rumble podcast – the episode had 99 views as of May 31 – to further spread election misinformation while managing Lindell’s campaign.

In the episode, Weible told the host that Lindell approached him before officially announcing his campaign to ask Weible who should be named his campaign manager. Weible volunteered, citing their shared passion for “election integrity.”

Weible also told the host that the current ballot system in Minnesota is built for fraud, citing as an example the election of Democratic Mayor of Minneapolis Jacob Frey.

“It’s not swinging toward conservative ways,” Weible postulated. “Why is that?”

Mike Lindell for Governor

Before Duluth, Lindell announced his intentions to not drop out of the race if he did not win the party’s official endorsement at the convention.

At the AMSOIL Arena on Saturday, the possibility of that increased with each ballot. By the third round of ballots, the race was down to Lindell, Demuth and Qualls, with none of them meeting a majority threshold to secure the endorsement.

In all early ballots, Demuth held a clear lead over the other two, until Lindell was ultimately dropped for the fifth ballot. The race narrowed between Qualls and Demuth until it was finally decided on the tenth ballot for Qualls.

Before the final vote was cast, Lindell called on his supporters to pool their vote with Qualls as a fellow outsider candidate.

Lindell, holding true to his earlier promise, announced on stage to the stadium that he was not dropping out of the race. His speech was immediately met by loud boos from the audience of Republican delegates.

Throughout all of this, the vote clickers repeatedly malfunctioned, casting doubt on the results. Those doubts were quickly picked up by the election conspiracist duo, Lindell and Weible.

“The voting machines broke down, so they say,” Lindell said into his phone as he recorded a video for social media on site, a smug grin creeping across his face. “They’ve had problems with them for two days. Pretty easy solution: paper ballots, hand counted.”

Weible took to X to plug USCASE and, like Lindell, advocate for hand-counted paper ballots.

“After the clicker failures at MN State Convention, it reaffirms our commitment to encourage all state parties to return to paper ballots hand count,” Weible wrote.

Also at the convention, a delegate held a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin three days after the sixth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. Lindell claimed he was not in the room when it happened, while Lindell’s pick for lieutenant governor, Phillip Parrish, told local news that Chauvin “should be released” from custody because “his prosecution was not lawful.”

The Minnesota primary election is on August 11, and the general election is on Nov. 3. Despite losing out on the state Republican Party’s endorsement, Lindell is committed to competing in the primary.

Cover image created and contributed by L. Cam Anderson.

Related coverage: The Deep Ties and Deeper Pockets of Minnesota’s Far-Right

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