Alabama’s Secretary of State says there have been “zero” altered votes in his state’s 2020 presidential election results. It’s a sharp rebuke to recent evidence-free claims from MyPillow CEO and Trump backer Mike Lindell that hackers may have “flipped” 100,000 votes in the state using Bluetooth technology.

       “We didn’t have any vote changes. Zero. It’s not possible to have any vote changed,” Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican, told AL.com on Wednesday. “All our (voting) machines are custom-built. There’s no modem component. You can’t influence them through a cell phone or a landline. There’s no way they can be probed or numbers manipulate.”

       On Sunday, Mr Lindell, a key Trump ally and one of the country’s most vocal boosters of unfounded election conspiracies, posted a video which praised Alabama as a “role model” in election security, but nonetheless alleged its systems had been “hacked … just like every other state.”

       “This was the one time we’re going to have to do a little bit of a deeper dive here. On the surface you can’t see where it happened,” Mr Lindell said in the video, where he doesn’t offer concrete evidence about his claims. “What I guarantee they’ve had to do in Alabama is the bad people … went deeper into the well. Very deep into the well of how they did the flips.”

       Last week, Mr Lindell visited top Alabama officials including governor Kay Ivey, saying he hoped to “test” the state’s voter registry.

       The Independent has reached out to Mr Lindell for comment.

       MAGA backers have challenged election results across the country — with numerous courts and recounts finding that virtually all of their claims to impactful voter fraud were false — but so far they haven’t gone after places where Donald Trump won as decisively as Alabama in 2020. The ex-president recaptured the state with a more than 26 per cent lead over Joe Biden, snagging more than 500,000 more votes than his rival.

       What’s more, Alabama has been a leader in the kind of restrictive voting rules the GOP has been pushing for around the country in recent years, following the demise of key parts of the Voting Rights Act.

       That hasn’t stopped Mr Lindell from charging ahead anyway.

       The controversial CEO is facing a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for his often unfounded comments about the company’s role in the election, to which he has counter-sued and claimed they violated racketeering laws.

       In August, Mr Lindell, who has no cybersecurity experience, hosted a cyber symposium about the 2020 election and claimed without proof that China committed election fraud.

       Recommended Florida lawmaker proposes Texas-style bill banning abortion as early as 6 weeks Michigan health official nearly run off the road by anti-masker Sidney Powell claims political aide was killed as part of election-related conspiracy

       Copies of widely used voter software by Dominion Voting Systems leaked to attendees of the event, potentially compromising the voting systems used in roughly 30 states, according to experts.

       “It’s a game-changer in that the environment we have talked about existing now is a reality,” Matt Masterson, a former top election security official in the Trump administration, told the Associated Press at the time. “We told election officials, essentially, that you should assume this information is already out there. Now we know it is, and we don’t know what they are going to do with it.”