2020 Election Fraud Investigator Is Only ‘Disproving’ Straw Men
Ken Block, a Rhode Island software engineer and founder of Simpatico Software Systems, released a “tell all” book called Disproven earlier this month that details his involvement with the Trump campaign’s efforts to find voter fraud and has become the subject of debate.
His principal arguments are largely a rhetorical construct, and he often gets over his skis. Right out of the gate, he makes so many misleading, inflammatory, and contradictory claims that it becomes a challenge to find where to even start unpacking them. Perhaps the best place to begin is where he began, with the first words of his “Introduction” chapter:
There may be no better-qualified person to discuss whether voter fraud impacted the 2020 presidential elections than the person hired by the Trump campaign to find it.
I am that person.
That claim doesn’t quite square with a story from The Washington Post reporting that similar work was conducted by the firm Berkeley Research Group, which was paid around $1 million. Block himself acknowledges the existence of another firm doing similar research, stating Berkeley reported directly to the White House.
According to the book, Block was hired by the Trump campaign without a nondisclosure agreement in place and paid $755,000 to find evidence of fraud in the election. CNN did an interview with Block when they reported on a USA Today opinion piece he penned titled, “Trump paid me to find voter fraud. Then he lied after I found [the] 2020 election wasn’t stolen.” While he admits in the interview it is possible his analysis might have “missed something,” he said he was “confident” that he didn’t.
Block stated in an NBC interview this month: “We found some dead voters and we found some duplicate voters but nowhere near enough to have changed the election result in any state,” but he also admits “there were many claims of fraud that never found their way to my desk” and that he had only 35 days to evaluate them.
Inflammatory Claim
Perhaps one of the most inflammatory claims he makes in the NBC interview was that the Trump campaign heard those assertions of not finding evidence of fraud that would “survive legal scrutiny” and overturn any state’s election results and “accepted that fact from me. They communicated that fact to Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s chief of staff at the time, and news reports show Mark Meadows took that finding directly into the Oval Office.” Block says in the CNN interview, “Mark Meadows’ response in the sworn deposition by the attorney that I reported to was that Meadows said ‘Well that means there was no there, there,’ referring to the claim of voter fraud.”
Assuming all that as fact, the question then is, was Meadows referring to all claims relating to voter fraud in general, or to the work done by Block specifically? Based on Meadows’ activities in December 2020, and the Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, it seems obvious Meadows was not persuaded that everything in Georgia was 100 percent fine and legal. And it wasn’t. But Block apparently didn’t bother to review the entire picture, certainly not in Georgia.
Yet Block goes on in the CNN interview to agree with the host that Trump and his allies knew there was no evidence of voter fraud, but continued to say there was.
I also know the White House was relying on more than just Block’s findings, because I am one of several other voter data analysts who provided input to the Trump attorneys, and I heard from Meadows directly about my analysis — on the afternoon of Nov. 28, 2020. I know this because it was only the second time in my career that I have been contacted by anyone from the White House, so I made a note of it in my calendar and saved his number in my phone. We spoke for about 20 minutes, and the discussion came across almost like a cross-examination. He was very interested in the subject matter, which is why he called.
Former Trump Attorney Responds
When I recently spoke about Block’s book with Cleta Mitchell, an attorney for the 2020 Trump legal team in Georgia, she candidly asserted that she first heard of Block’s public statements about finding “no fraud” in the summer of 2023, she asked Meadows about them, and he had no idea who Block was. That makes sense because Block claims Trump attorney Alex Cannon hired him and kept his identity concealed from the campaign to shield him from pressure. Mitchell further advised that no one in the Trump legal team in Georgia had been approached by Block at any time and that Block had not reviewed any of the data or facts contained in the election contest filed on behalf of President Trump on Dec. 4, 2020, but which was not assigned to a judge in time to adjudicate the issues it raised.
Additionally, Mitchell told me, as she has said publicly many times:
Ken Block completely misses the point of the concerns about the 2020 election. We were not alleging in our election contest that there was “massive voter fraud.” Vote fraud is a legal term of art, and it requires elements that we had no way to investigate or prove in court. What we did find was that there were more votes that had been cast in violation of Georgia state law and included in the certified total, than the margin between President Trump and Joe Biden.
Mitchell explained that under Georgia law, if there are more illegal votes than the margin between two candidates, the remedy is a new election. “There are many other types of illegal votes besides ‘fraudulent’ votes. We documented in our election contest many, many more illegal votes than the margin between Trump and Biden and were prepared to prove it in court, but we never had the opportunity to present that evidence in a hearing,” Mitchell said.
Trump’s 64-page complaint, accompanied by more than 1,100 pages of affidavits, data, and expert opinions, did not allege widespread voter fraud, she said. “So Block is ‘disproving’ something that our election contest did not allege.”
My Discussion with Block
I got wind of Block and his claims in 2022 and gave him a call to discuss them. That was the first and only conversation I have ever had with him. I explained to him that there were a number of analysts providing input to the Trump attorneys, which he already knew, and that I was one of them, which he did not know.
I am a voter data analyst who has been working with voter data in Georgia since 1986. I have been qualified and admitted to serve as an expert witness in election cases involving voter data analytics and residency issues five times since 2002. I was not hired or paid anything by the Trump campaign and never asked to be. The analysis I did was motivated by my own personal curiosity. I did it at no one’s bidding, and my company already had all the software licenses and processing capabilities I needed to do it, so I had none of the outside expenses Block says he had.
According to the final certified election results for the 2020 general election in Georgia, Joe Biden received 11,779 more votes than Trump. When my analysis indicated there were nearly 35,000 votes cast with illegal residency issues, I immediately realized that was an indication that systemic irregularities had occurred in the Georgia election and turned that data over to the Trump attorneys. They had it reviewed by another analyst and then included it in their Georgia election case. I was prepared to serve as an expert witness in that case, but the case never made it into a courtroom. I also turned that data and corroborating evidence associated with it over to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for a full investigation in May 2021. To date, no report of that investigation has been issued by Raffensperger who, by the way, wrote the forward to Block’s book.
In our conversation, Block indicated that he had been looking at voter data from a campaign’s perspective for a number of years but was relatively new to using voter data analytics to unearth illegal voting activity. Having worn both hats myself for many years, we discussed those differing perspectives. He also explained that he had never become aware of me or my analysis. I recall having a difficult time getting him to understand that analysis, the evidence it produced, the corroborating evidence I have been gathering since the 2020 election, and how it all ties in with Georgia election laws.
I also explained the litigation in the Fair Fight v. True the Vote case surrounding challenges that were filed based on my analysis, as well as a similar analysis done by True the Vote, long before we ultimately prevailed in that case. Block and I also discussed the background information surrounding the argument over that data that erupted between President Trump and his attorneys and Raffensperger and his staff when they demanded an investigation into that data before, during, and after their now-infamous phone call on Jan. 2, 2021. None of that fit his narrative, and I can find no mention of any of that in his book, though he says he was still writing it in 2023.
Detecting Fraud
Block’s claims are legitimate in places and flimsy in others, and there are issues he either missed or failed to grasp. We agree that the claims of large numbers of dead people voting were overblown, and some of those can be traced to people who did Social Security death index matching without being aware of its limitations. We also agree that “True fraud is detectable, quantifiable, and verifiable,” as he states in the book.
I told him I once believed Georgia had no double voting, until election attorney Jake Evans and I found and litigated it in a 2020 Long County case. At the conclusion of the trial, the judge ruled that double voting had occurred. The controversy over that case led to a statewide investigation by the secretary of state’s office, which found hundreds of double votes cast in the 2020 presidential preference primary and later found more in the general election. Further, Fulton County has subsequently admitted that there were “about 3,000 votes” that were double counted in 2020 in that county alone.
Several other Georgia election-integrity advocates including Jason Frazier, Tim Suddreth, and Dr. Rick Richards have also found three different kinds of double voting in Georgia: people who vote more than once on one registration number, vote more than once on multiple registration numbers, or vote there and in another state. I explained to Block that I found more than 6,000 voters who held more than 12,000 registrations which showed the same name, year of birth, race, sex, and street address, and several hundred of those voters were shown to have voted more than once — most by voting early or absentee and then again on Election Day. Block discussed none of that in his book.
When Block told me he was writing a book, I remember thinking, “A book about what? Finding nothing? Isn’t that a bit like ‘Seinfeld,’ the show about nothing?” I have never personally seen anyone come across the southern border illegally; does that mean illegal immigration has also been “disproven”?
Block spends a great deal of time explaining the limitations of his work, including chapter 19, which is titled, “Can Trump’s claim of massive mail ballot fraud be disproved? No.” Yet elsewhere in the book he also proclaims, “I am confident of my assertion that no evidence of massive voter fraud exists in the 2020 voting data.”
In the book’s “conclusion” chapter, Block states, “Our elections are in fact rigged and unfair,” not because of fraud but because “the playing field on which our elections are conducted is not level for all,” and that voters “simply want the government to make the trains run on time” — and we agree on most of that too.
At the end of the day, Block may sell some books, but I doubt he will ever be hired again by anyone with any sense to do the kind of analysis he did. He may not have had a nondisclosure agreement, but betraying the trust of his client, especially as publicly as he did, is rarely admirable.
Mark Davis is president of Data Productions, Inc., and has been working with voter data since 1986. He has been qualified and admitted to testify as an expert witness on voter data analytics and residency issues in court cases involving disputed elections five times over the last 20 years.
