'Definitely false': Investigator explains pushback he got from Trump campaign when 'no fraud was determined'
Following his loss to president Joe Biden in 2020, ex-President Donald Trump and his allies hired Ken Block, owner of Simpatico Voting Systems, with the goal to find evidence of widespread voter fraud. However, he did not find any.
Block penned an op-ed published by USA Today Tuesday, January 2, explaining more in-depth his unsuccessful quest to find fraud, which echoes his upcoming book, "Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data That Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections."
The investigator spoke with MSNBC's Joy Reid during the latest episode of The ReidOut to discuss his findings.
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"When you started looking at these voter fraud allegations, did you believe they could be true?" Reid asked.
"I went into my work for the Trump campaign with an open mind," Block replied. "I know what they wanted me to find and what I told them before we started everything was that I would do my best, but whatever the data showed is what the data would show. And as I worked my way through the data looking for fraud on my own, it was clear pretty early on that we weren't gonna come anywhere close to finding the fraud the campaign needed us to try to find."
Reid said, "Rudy Giuliani has been sued for defamation, successfully, by two election poll workers who he defamed, claiming they committed voter fraud. and he still is insisting, even after that, that he was correct about that. did you find anything that happened in Georgia that would indicate fraud by election officials at all?"
Block replied, "So, no, but to be clear, my task, and my area of expertise, is looking at voter data. And so the claims of voter fraud that i was asked to evaluate were claims that were made based upon someone's interpretation of data. What Rudy Giuliani brought forward in terms of his allegations against Ruby Freeman, for example, other than the fact that they were straight-up lies, as he admitted, there was no data behind his allegations. It was an interpretation of the video. And I had nothing to do with that."
READ MORE: Election software expert hired by Trump debunks ex-president’s 'steady diet of lies and innuendo'
The MSNBC host asked, "What was the reaction when you would repeat on a rolling basis, 'there's no fraud here, no fraud in Arizona, no fraud in Michigan.' As you would tell them that, what was the campaign's reaction?"
Block said, "The first couple of claims they asked me to look at, the question was, 'Can you tell me if this is right? Help us understand.' By the end, every claim I was given was prefaced with, 'Tell me why this one is wrong.'"
Reid then noted, "So The Washington Post did something similar. they look to the voter fraud things that were happening in republican states, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Arkansas, Georgia, a grand total of 47 convictions during a period in which tens of millions of votes were cast. 76% of those defendants whose race or ethnicity could be identified for Black or hispanic, while white people constituted 24% of those prosecuted for something like errors and mistakes and voting. Did the Trump campaign seem particularly interested in precincts were lots of Black and brown people lived?"
He replied, "My work was on a statewide basis. I didn't drill down into specific precincts are counties. The work that I did particularly was looking for deceased voters, was looking for duplicate voters, and we were taking as much of a national look at that as we could. The claims that came to me that others brought were also more or less statewide claims as opposed to anything that was dealing with, especially down at the precinct level, no. There was nothing like that."
Reid asked, "And so you didn't find claims of millions in millions of dead people voting? Millions of people voted using other peoples names, that kind of thing?"
Block said, "Yeah, there was no data that I was able to uncover that showed enough voter fraud that could have altered any election result in any state that we had. To the campaign's credit, as we worked our way through this, the lawyers I reported to were interested in the truth of the matter. They accepted what I told them. They brought my information to Mark Meadows, and they told Mark Meadows, who was Trump's chief of staff at the time, that no fraud was determined, that the campaign could find. And then we learned that Mark Meadows took that information and brought it to the Oval Office. So, my work found its way all the way into the Oval Office. They knew the campaign through my efforts was unable to not only find fraud on its own, but all the other claims of fraud we were asked to look at were most definitely false."
Watch the video below or at this link.
'We didn’t find any': Voter fraud investigator explains pushback he received from Trump campaignyoutu.be
READ MORE: GOP voter fraud prosecutions only yielded 47 convictions out of tens of millions of ballots: report
