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Salon
Salon
Politics
Gabriella Ferrigine

Trump's fraud expert debunks his "lies"

An expert hired by Donald Trump to substantiate the former president’s voter fraud claims regarding the 2020 presidential election called him out for continuing to peddle falsehoods. Trump in November of 2020, shortly after losing the election, entered into a contract with Ken Block of Simpatico Software Systems, according to The Washington Post. However, Block on Tuesday penned an op-ed for USA Today asserting that his research never yielded anything to support Trump’s claims — and instead wholly debunked them. 

“I am the expert who was hired by the Trump campaign,” Block wrote. “The findings of my company’s in-depth analysis are detailed in the depositions taken by the Selection Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The transcripts show that the campaign found no evidence of voter fraud sufficient to change the outcome of any election. That message was communicated directly to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.” He then underscored the “steady diet of lies and innuendo” that the ex-president has used in an effort to “overcome the truth,” before noting that the "cries that the election was lost or stolen due to voter fraud continue with no sign of stopping.”

"The constant drumbeat hardens people’s hearts and minds to the truth about the 2020 election. Emails and documents show that the voter data available to the campaign contained no evidence of large-scale voter fraud based on data mining and fraud analytics," he wrote. "More important, claims of voter fraud made by others were verified as false, including proof of why those claims were disproven." Block also noted that his investigation’s findings have been shared with special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, both of whom have criminally charged Trump over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. “What these claims don’t take into account is that voter fraud is detectable, quantifiable and verifiable. I have yet to see anyone offer up 'evidence' of voter fraud from the 2020 election that provides these three things,” Block continued. "My company’s contract with the campaign obligated us to deliver evidence of voter fraud that could be defended in a court of law. The small amount of voter fraud I found was bipartisan, with about as many Republicans casting duplicate votes as Democrats.”

“As a former gubernatorial candidate,” Block added, “I can admire the discipline it takes to stay on message on a single issue. There is no doubt that voter fraud can animate people. But it is one thing to provide a rallying point for supporters and quite another to drag our election infrastructure and legal system into a foundationless set of false claims.” He concluded: “A better use of time, money and energy would be to address systemic weaknesses in our election systems – such as the distressing lack of national election infrastructure to enforce election integrity, destructive practices to our elections such as gerrymandering, and leveling the playing field so that our elections become fairer and more competitive. If voter fraud had impacted the 2020 election, it would already have been proven. Maintaining the lies undermines faith in the foundation of our democracy.”

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