Forget the false vote fraud claims. Here’s the real reason Trump lost Wisconsin. | Opinion

Did more than 740,000 Wisconsin voters cast fraudulent ballots in 2020? This was the most outlandish claim the Trump campaign asked me to evaluate as part of my contract to look for voter fraud immediately after the election. It also had the simplest explanation for why it was wrong. I determined every single fraud claim that the campaign asked me to review to be false.

Much time, effort, and money has been spent trying to find proof for the claim that some kind of fraud caused President Trump’s 2020 election loss in Wisconsin. While there are many remarkable elements to the voter fraud narrative, it amazes me that the most straightforward explanations for Trump’s loss are overlooked. And let’s be clear: more than three years post-election, there is no evidence that Wisconsin election officials certified the wrong winner in 2020.

What are these straightforward explanations as to why Trump lost? Let’s start with an easily provable reason: In 2020, voters cast over 38,000 votes for the Libertarian candidate, Jo Jorgensen. Jorgensen’s vote count was nearly twice the margin of President Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Had Trump convinced Libertarians to abandon their party and vote for him, he could have won.

Another astonishing and undeniable trend emerged when I compared the 2016 and 2020 election results.

Trump told moderate Republicans to take a hike. They did.

In most of Wisconsin’s counties, whether blue or red, Trump’s share of the vote declined in 2020 relative to 2016. Most of Wisconsin’s red counties (those that Trump won in 2016 and 2020) saw a drop in Trump’s vote share in 2020, although Trump cleaned up in the state’s smallest red counties.

Trump’s underperformance meant that he lost more than 37,000 votes in 2020 in Wisconsin’s red counties alone — a fact that argues strongly against the voter fraud narrative. Why would anyone commit voter fraud in a very conservative county if it harmed the conservative candidate?

Are gold high tops key to Trump win?No. They show how badly out of touch he is.

Those 37,000 votes that Trump lost are easily explained. He told moderate Republicans to take a hike, and those lost votes confirm that these voters did as they were told. Trump would have likely won Wisconsin had he not ostracized the RINOs. How can a candidate so concerned about a few thousand imaginarily fraudulent votes be so cavalier about losing the support of millions of voters across the country?

Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, documented this loss of moderate GOP support in a December 2020 report detailing exit polling results across the swing states commissioned by the Trump campaign. Politico.com obtained this internal campaign document and has it on its website.

Wisconsin does not provide voter registrant’s date of birth

Wisconsin posed a significant challenge to me when trying to assess if dead voters cast any of the mail ballots in 2020. The state provides no piece of a registrant’s date of birth, making it impossible to uniquely identify a voter and perform this check. I can say with certainty that dead voters played no role in Trump’s loss in the other swing states, but I cannot say so for Wisconsin. I doubt zombie voters accounted for Trump’s loss by more than 20,000 votes (they didn’t in any other state I examined), but wouldn’t it be nice to say so with certainty?

Ron Johnson tried to overthrow election.He should pay price for his role.

Wisconsin is exempt from requirements imposed by the National Voter Rights Act of 1993. The state’s exemption and decision to not voluntarily abide by the Act’s mandates have large negative impacts on national election integrity. If you cannot uniquely identify a voter, you cannot determine if that voter is registered to vote in other places. Inconsistency is the enemy of integrity and Wisconsin’s exemption and withholding of a crucial piece of identifying data (which nearly every other state provides) is not helpful.

The 740,000 votes that some ‘volunteers’ claimed were fraudulent came about because those doing the analysis did not understand the data they were looking at. They quickly got their discovery visibility in the White House via a manager at a Trump golf course, which is how the claim came to me. They also wanted the Department of Justice to descend on the state and, I guess, start busing thousands of people off to jail.

Voter fraud did not cause Trump’s 2020 Wisconsin election loss. The amazingly close race was lost because Trump’s messaging was too narrow.

Ken Block owns Simpatico Software Systems and is the author of 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 account of his voter fraud investigations for the Trump campaign.