When former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he hired Ken Block’s data mining firm to try and find evidence to back up the wild allegations Trump and his campaign were making about voter fraud. Instead, Block found none, and now his work could be used to help prosecute Trump.
“I’ve received subpoenas from both Jack Smith’s federal investigation into potential crimes related to Jan. 6 and also Fani Willis’ investigation of potential election crimes committed in Georgia,” Block told Rolling Stone in an interview. “All of my work and all of my work product for the campaign is in the hands of both of those investigations. And the totality of that work shows and proves no voter fraud was found.”
The Trump campaign hired Block’s firm, Simpatico Software Systems, shortly after the election, as it was trying — and failing — to investigate 15 different categories of voter fraud claims with the goal of finding evidence it could use in court. Trump’s campaign reported paying the firm $755,000 in November 2020.
In a new opinion piece published Tuesday, Block says his firm found only a tiny amount of voter fraud spread almost equally between Democratic and Republican voters. None of it, he wrote, was significant enough to have affected the election.
“Those findings were communicated to the top of Trump’s campaign apparatus,” Block now says in an interview. As the Trump campaign struggled to vet fraud claims, campaign staff briefed an incredulous White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Meadows, in turn, eventually told Trump himself in December of 2020 that the voter fraud allegations from top campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani were all bogus.
The Trump campaign leveraged a number of false voter fraud conspiracy theories to fuel its litigation efforts to overturn election results, including a December 2020 lawsuit against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. But Block says that, even as some in the Trump campaign were eager to pursue the most outlandish theories, his firm’s methodical work disproving voter fraud claims helped block multiple lawsuits.
“We stopped lawsuits whose foundation was terrible data. More than once,” Block says.
Even as many in the campaign, like Giuliani, pressed ahead with wild conspiracy claims, “the non-reckless side of the campaign did conduct due diligence, wanted to know the honest truth about the data and what it told us, and they did the right thing in communicating that information up the chain,” Block recalls.
Block’s book, “Disproven,” is scheduled for release in March, and he says the memoir of his work on the 2020 campaign also contains data on why Trump lost the election.
“There is data now available that shows exactly why Trump lost the election,” he says. “I did that analysis. I have the results. A lot of people will be very surprised by what is, in effect, a very logical reason for why he lost, but I go through an entire proof that shows what happened.”
