<figure><figcaption> Ken Block(Mark Lavonier)</figcaption></figure>

On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks to Ken Block, author of the 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."

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Almost four years after the fact, we are still hearing about a supposedly stolen 2020 presidential election. My guest today is uniquely positioned to discuss this. He was the data analytics expert that the Trump campaign hired to investigate fraud in the election. Yet he found that there wasn't a case to be made. Ken Block is a political reformer and software engineer. The founder of the Moderate Party of Rhode Island, a former candidate for governor, and most importantly, again for our conversation here today, he's the author of a new book titled “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.” Mr. Block, welcome to the program. Really interested to hear what you have to say.

Ken Block: I am so looking forward to this conversation. Let's go.

GR: All right. Great. Well, first of all, obviously this topic has become so tangled, it's going to be hard to unwrap it in the 27 minutes or so that we have. But we're going to try. I think the first thing that we ought to do briefly, if we can do this briefly, is to establish your credentials as an expert and your political background, because I'm sure that anyone listening is going to be wondering about those things right away. So tell us, tell us who you are in that regard.

KB: Sure. So, I am, a, 30-year veteran of the technology industry. I specialize in large database applications. I have an expert a knowledge expert in my field. I came to politics late in life, and I came into politics because in, 2008 or so, I became very unhappy with the choices that the two political parties were offering up to me. I became, very unhappy with what at the time, felt like a lot of hyper-partisanship. Of course, it's much worse now.

GR: Yeah. Those were the good old days.

KB: Yeah. And, in a spectacular, explosion of naivete, I said, well, the right answer is to start a new political party. And I, was the godfather of, in Rhode Island, the Moderate Party, which was a centrist political party. And, it was quite a fight to create the party. We had to sue the state in federal court, get some laws declared unconstitutional just to be given the chance to try to start the party. And, we, won the court case. We had to collect a huge number of signatures in order to qualify the party for the ballot. Then we had to stay on the ballot once we got on the ballot. And, I was essentially, because no good deed goes unpunished, my executive committee basically looked at me and said, well, now you have to run for governor so we can keep the party. So, that's how I got into politics. And, I, exceeded expectations in 2010, I got 6.5% of the vote, as running as a complete unknown and participating in about 40 debates. I realized that I was good at politics. I was really good at the debates. And I had the bug, and I realized in 2012 that, a third party just is too hard to do. I abandoned the party in 2012. I ran for governor in 2014, as a Republican, because in my state of Rhode Island, it's an incredibly blue state. And if you want to make change in Rhode Island, you can't do it from within the Democratic Party. The machine is, all-powerful. So the only option left to me was running as a Republican. I lost my statewide primary by 3000 votes. And I'm fond of saying now that, voter fraud was not to blame for my loss.

GR: Okay, so that explains then. I'm guessing, then, that the Trump campaign, when they came to you, you know, you were the they thought this this guy's not going to be hostile to a Republican candidate. He's got the data analytics chops to do this. So you were sort of the right combination for them. What were the initial, I'm curious to know, what were the initial stated grounds or the suspicions about the outcome that were communicated to you? I mean, the campaign comes to you and they say, we think this has a problem because of what?

KB: Well, interestingly, the lawyer who approached me to do this work, his name is Alex Cannon, did not come to me asking me for aspecific finding. He actually wanted proper due diligence. We, he asked me to provide an estimate for what it would take to look for deceased voters, to look for duplicate voters, where a voter votes in more than one jurisdiction in the same election. And as we discussed doing the work, I told him that in a decade of looking, very closely at voter data, I'd never seen anything close to what I knew the campaign needed to be found. And his response to that was, well, I appreciate your candor and, I want a straight-up assessment. You know, if you find it, you find it. I said, look, if I find it, it will survive legal scrutiny. So, yeah, you know, it'll be a foundation for, legal action if we find it. I said, if we don't find it, I'm going to tell you I didn't find it, and that's the end of it. And he said, perfect. Off we go. So there wasn't an expectation. And that's always surprising to people when I describe, what the nature of my engagement was, the lawyers I reported to were doing their professional due diligence in every, in every way. Which is a very unexpected thing for people to learn.

GR: So, briefly, what did you find?

KB: We found evidence of voter fraud in small amounts. We found some dead voters. We found some duplicate voters, nowhere near enough to have changed the election result in any of the swing states. And as I made Alex aware, as we were moving through all of this, I said, look, even imagine in Georgia that we found 20,000 fraudulent votes. Even if we find those votes, it still can't change the election result, because we have no way of determining for whom those fraudulent votes were cast. And so, without being able to do that, you can't show the harm the campaign needs to show to claim that something should be changed with the election result. And Alex, as a lawyer, got that right away. Unfortunately, it seems like almost nobody else in the country seems to have figured that out.

GR: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, because when I was thinking about this, I was thinking, how would you go about investigate this? I would think that at some point you would need to have individual human testimony, right? Like this person paid me to vote twice or, you know, I admit I voted twice. I was part of a group that tried to do that. Or, you know, we got these dead people to vote. I mean, don't you have to sort of have a testimony of some sort?

KB: Well, I think if you if we had been able to identify again, I am very careful when I talk about these hypotheticals. We didn't identify, but imagine if we did identify 20,000 deceased voters in Georgia. We would only need to be able to show two things. That the person who cast the vote is legally dead, and we have the ability to do that. But what we couldn't show is that, that vote was cast, on, you know, as a vote for, Biden or as a vote for Trump. That's not possible to do in our form of democracy. Who you vote for is anonymous by design and you would never want to be able to trace back who a specific individual voted for. So, had we found 20,000 fraudulent votes in Georgia, you can make a weak argument that you should redo the election because of the number of those votes, but because you couldn't prove the harm that those votes caused. I doubt any judge would have gone to that far to have changed the outcome of the election.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is Ken Block, and we're discussing his new book. It's titled “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.” So you come back to the Trump campaign and you say, I didn't find anything. I didn't find what you guys were looking for. Here's what I found. How did they react? You said only the lawyers seem to understand.

KB: Yeah. So Alex did a couple of things besides giving me the freedom to give him a straight-up assessment. He also provided me political cover. Nobody above him knew my identity or the identity of my company while we were doing this work. And that was done specifically to avoid a problem where political pressure from the imagine potentially the White House, for example, would be brought to bear on me or my company, to find a specific set of results. So Alex was very receptive and understanding, of the fact that we couldn't find enough voter fraud to matter. He communicated that to Mark Meadows, who was Trump's Chief of Staff at the time. Meadows accepted that finding of fact as true, and he took that information into the Oval Office. What we glossed over here is that while I was asked to look for voter fraud, data mining for voter fraud, the second day of my contract, Alex started asking me to assess the validity of claims of voter fraud that other people brought to the attention of the campaign. And we looked at about 20 different claims of voter fraud, in the one-month window in which we had done all this work. And every single one of those voter fraud claims, I was able to show Alex why they