Ep. 9: Data Analytics Expert and former Trump Campaign Consultant Ken Block

The Ballot Box Briefing is a weekly segment on Sirius XM’s The Briefing, that examines the issues and storylines at the heart of running an efficient and accurate election. Guests include election administrators, local, state, and federal officials, cybersecurity experts, legal analysts, and members of BPC’s Democracy Program.

Author Ken Block talked about his new book “Disproven” detailing his work for the Trump campaign investigating allegations of voter fraud in the days after the 2020 presidential election.

Transcript

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

STEVE SCULLY (SS): This week our guest is Ken Block. His brand-new book is called Disproven. Who won the 2020 election?  

KEN BLOCK (KB): President Biden definitely won the election. I spent a lot of time considering that question and producing the evidence that showed that President Biden was the winner of this race. 

SS: The subtitle of the book is, “My unbiased search for voter fraud for the Trump campaign, the data that shows why he lost, and how we can improve our elections.” Take us back to November of 2020. The election returns come in and Joe Biden has declared the winner. What happens? 

KB: Two days after the election, my cell phone rang, and it was Alex Cannon. He was a paid attorney working within the Trump campaign infrastructure and he called me out of the blue. I hadn’t ever heard his name before and didn’t recognize anything about it. He asked me to help the campaign look for voter fraud, and after some fraught conversations with my wife and daughter, I decided that it was an incredible opportunity to be able to audit a presidential election with limitless resources and I jumped at the at the chance to do it. 

To Alex’s credit, he allowed me to perform my work without outside influence or pressure. They didn’t have expectations for specific results that I would deliver. They wanted me to conduct the work that I did with an eye towards finding results that would survive legal scrutiny in court. That was the important framing on all of it. We looked very hard for evidence of fraud– deceased voters, voters who cast votes in two different places. While we found some low level of fraud, we found nothing close to changing the outcome of the race in any of the swing states. 

SS: When I came across your book and your name, I Googled it. There are a lot of people named Ken Block. I mention that for obvious reasons–you were looking at voters’ names that were similar but voted in different states. 

KB: A lot of fraud hunters in 2020 could pretty easily access voter data, and they looked for the names and dates of birth and found some people with the same name and the same date of birth in two different places. This was particularly important in Georgia—there were some claims of voter fraud in Georgia by an analyst who had made this mistake. He determined that there were tens of thousands of duplicate votes, people with the same name and year of birth in Georgia and Arizona. He was dead wrong, because when you match like that, 90% of the time the match is wrong because we have a lot of shared names in this country. If you put enough people in a room together, you’re going to find that you can have the same name and the same exact date of birth and still be two different people. It’s totally legitimate. 

SS: You get a call about Wisconsin specifically—700,000 votes that don’t add up. That would have tipped the election clearly to Donald Trump. 

KB: Aside from the Trump campaign asking me to look for fraud within election data, they quickly trusted my judgment and asked me to help them perform their due diligence on claims of voter fraud that other people brought to the table. These claims were theoretically going to be used to inform lawsuits challenging the election results. 

The Wisconsin claim came at the very end of my 35 days of work, and it was a doozy. Some self-described volunteers in Wisconsin had incorrectly determined—because they didn’t understand the data—that more than 700,000 people in Wisconsin had voted twice, and they got very excited by this. This was the smoking gun to prove that Trump was right. They wanted the Department of Justice to come in and start arresting huge numbers of people for committing election fraud. They never stopped to question whether that result could be because they did something wrong, and what they did wrong was that the file they looked at was only mail ballot votes. It didn’t include 700,000 in-person votes. I quickly realized this. I told Alex Cannon, the lawyer I reported to, that this was wrong. 

That’s a great encapsulation of what was happening in the country at this point in time. Huge numbers of people were trying to validate Trump’s claim of fraud. Most of those claims were hearsay and not legally admissible evidence. The ones that were founded in data came to my desk, and I was able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that every single one of them was wrong. That’s why I feel very comfortable re-answering the question that you asked me when you kicked off–who won the election? President Biden won the election. Everything that has come up to support the claim that President Trump had the election stolen from him has no basis in fact or it’s hearsay that can’t be used legally to challenge the election result even if it was true. 

SS: And yet, Donald Trump continues to say that the election was stolen, and his supporters believe him. In fact, in some of the early primary and caucus states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, up to 68% are saying that they feel as Republicans that the election was stolen. 

KB: It’s a real problem. I’ve written this book in a very neutral voice. I’m not picking sides. I’m just stating the facts as I determined them in my work for the Trump campaign. I’m not casting blame. I really want conservatives to understand why the election result came out the way it was and, most importantly, why all those fraud claims were wrong. They were usually wrong because the people doing the analysis didn’t understand what they were looking at. 

I was subpoenaed by Jack Smith. All my communications with the Trump campaign are part of the investigation running here in DC right now. All of my communications with the Trump campaign have been subpoenaed by Fani Willis in the Fulton County legal matter. I’ve had tremendous media coverage of my receipt of these subpoenas, of my book launch with a national opinion piece back in January, and now as I’m doing my book tour. For all of the coverage I’m getting, none of it is from conservative media. The real problem that you’re voicing—that so many conservatives still believe that voter fraud is a problem—they’re not receiving information to counter that narrative. I cannot get an audience on any conservative network to talk about my experience in doing this work for the Trump campaign. 

SS: You were providing factual information and basically saying, “Look, there are no shenanigans here; there is no major voter fraud.” What was the reaction from Team Trump? 

KB: I was very walled off from the campaign. Almost all of my interactions were directly with Alex Cannon. On a daily basis, he delivered me somebody’s claim of fraud, and I would sometimes have a few hours to figure out why it was wrong–and I did. We had this running dialogue. He took the totality of my findings—the fact that I couldn’t find evidence of data-driven voter fraud that I was looking for—to Mark Meadows. In his deposition before the January 6th Committee, he narrates bringing my findings to Mark Meadows, telling him that we didn’t find anything and that we looked really hard. Mark Meadows accepted his findings as true and famously said, “So there’s no ‘there’ there,” meaning that the claims of voter fraud were false. Subsequent to that, as we learned in some media reports in the last few months, Meadows took those findings to the Oval Office and broke the news there. Not that it mattered, but he did bring the fact that the campaign couldn’t find evidence of voter fraud to the Oval Office. 

SS: What did you learn about mistakes that are made in elections? Elections are run by human beings and there are always going to be some clerical errors, some miscalculations, and some double counting of votes. How widespread is that? 

KB: Sometimes it’s hard to discern between an actual illegal activity as opposed to a clerical error. What I can tell you is in 2017 and 2018, I looked at the 2016 election results across 24 states and I was able to confirm about 8,000 duplicate votes cast between all those states, with about 2,200 of those votes occurring in Florida and some other state. That’s one of the reasons I can say with great certainty that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Even had I not done any of the work I did in 2020, based on the work I did with the 2016 data, there was nowhere near enough voter fraud to overcome the margins of victory in any of the states in 2020.  

When you look at the 2,200 duplicate votes in Florida and consider that in the year 2000 Bush beat Gore by 547 votes, it’s a meaningful number in terms of the margin of victory. However, let’s imagine that I found 15,000 fraudulent votes in Georgia (I didn’t, but let’s imagine). That is bigger than the margin of 12,000 that Trump lost by in 2020. It’s one thing to find the votes are fraudulent–it’s quite another to make the determination that those fraudulent votes harmed the Trump campaign. When we vote, we vote anonymously. You cannot tell based on someone’s registration who that person voted for. Even with fraudulent votes, the Trump campaign could never convince a judge that they had been harmed by those votes. In my layman’s understanding of the law, I believe that any lawsuit that could show that fraud occurred would fail to convince a judge to take some action to overturn the election results because it couldn’t show harm. 

The fraud that I have found over the years is about 50-50 Republicans and Democrats–it’s a bipartisan activity. It’s much more likely a crime of privilege; people who own homes in two different places sometimes vote in those multiple registrations in multiple places. It’s not the narrative that is being sold, which is that it’s a crime being committed by folks who have their own different motivations. It’s really a crime of privilege from what I’ve seen. 

SS: Let me conclude with this question: If there was one thing that we should better understand or know about our election system going into 2024, what is it? 

KB: The thing about our system that’s most broken in my mind–and it’s something that cannot possibly be fixed in time for the election that’s coming up–is the fact that our elections are mostly uncompetitive. Most seats for Congress are predetermined based on the party of the person who sits in the seat. In our presidential elections, all but six or seven states matter. All the other ones, the outcome is preordained. The unwillingness to compromise that we see in Congress now is a result of uncompetitive elections. 

I think competition is good. It’s good for the markets and it’s good for keeping prices low. Competitive elections force candidates to move more to the middle because they need the votes to win. The middle part of the very overly long subtitle of my book is, ‘The data that shows why Trump lost.’ Trump lost because he told the moderate Republicans to get lost, and they did. And that’s confirmed in my data, that’s confirmed in Secretary Raffensberger’s data for what happened in Georgia, and that’s even confirmed by President Trump’s chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio. He published an exit poll of 30,000 voters across the swing states directly after the 2020 election and he quantified that one out of six of those voters were Republicans who voted against Trump. That’s why Trump lost.