Yahoo News Trump’s Voter Fraud Expert Shot Down His Campaign’s Election Lies
Ken Block couldn’t believe it. The mild-mannered Republican elections expert had seen a lot of things in his brief work as a consultant for former President Donald Trump’s campaign, after he was hired in late 2020 to find proof of mass election fraud that could stand up in court. This, however, was special.
A group of pro-Trump activists in Wisconsin were convinced they had found 740,070 cases of Wisconsin voters who voted twice — or around 22 percent of all votes cast in the state that year. The claim, which would have amounted to the largest case of fraud in American history, appeared absurd on its face.
The Trump campaign, however, treated it with the utmost urgency, in a mix of high farce and low comedy that became the hallmark of the MAGA movement’s fraud fever after the election. “They took their proof to the manager of a Trump golf course, who forwarded that proof to Eric Trump, who delivered it to the [Trump campaign] lawyer I reported to, Alex Cannon,” Block recalls in an interview with Rolling Stone.
“[It] was insane that a claim like that rose to the level it did. I’m sure it found its way to the Oval Office before it found its way to me,” Block says.
The work in the amateur claim was, of course, bogus — a combination of fan theories from the now-defunct far-right web forum thedonald.win, mixed with a complete misunderstanding of how voter data in Wisconsin is reported.
The anecdote is featured in Block’s new book “Disproven,” a memoir of his time assisting the fruitless hunt for mass voter fraud as a consultant for the Trump campaign, and a compilation of his thoughts on how to reform the way America conducts elections. The book delves deeply into what he didn’t find — namely, any evidence of the mass voter fraud that Trump to this day still falsely claims denied him a victory in 2020.
But the book offers a rare look from within the Trump campaign as it sought to overturn the election. Trump’s claims of voter fraud were both bold and immediate, leaving his aides scrambling to work backwards from them in an increasingly absurd confirmation bias treasure hunt. It’s an experience that turned Block, who told the campaign what it did not want to hear, into a subject of interest for Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Smith’s team, Block writes in the book, asked him to turn over his correspondence and work for the campaign in a subpoena connected to the investigation of Trump’s effort to overturn the election. Trump was indicted on four counts last year as part of Smith’s election subversion probe.
Block comes across as an unlikely fit for the Trump campaign. At times a member of Rhode Island’s Moderate and Republican parties, Block’s politics are of the decidedly moderate flavor — Trump nemesis and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) wrote the foreword to his book. Far from the conspiracy-addled types that orbited the campaign at that time, Block speaks in citations, data, and a devil’s advocate readout of his own opinions.
He stood in stark contrast to many of the conspiracy-addled staffers working for the Trump campaign in late 2020 as it sought to undo the election. But the number of consultants with expertise in the arcane, complex, and varying world of voter data was quite small, and Block was one of the few who could work at that level.
“Honestly, to his [Alex Cannon’s] credit and the credit of the other lawyers that he worked closely with, they wanted to do their due diligence correctly and in a way that would stand up in a court of law,” says Block. “One of the first things Alex told me was that he was going to isolate me from political pressures so that I could do my job thoroughly and independently. Because of his actions, I was not leaned on by anybody who wanted to dictate a specific outcome to me.”
Not every Trump lawyer was so careful. Rudy Giuliani, for instance, was indicted in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, and is facing potential disbarment in Washington, D.C. over his role in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the election in Pennsylvania based on bogus evidence.
In the memoir, Block measures his success working on the Trump campaign in the shoddy lawsuits he helped stop from ever reaching a court docket. One that found its way to Block’s desk for verification was a lawsuit drafted for the state of Nevada. The suit claimed that voters had cast 16,097 duplicate votes in the state. Block writes that John Eastman, the Trump campaign lawyer — now fellow Trump co-defendant in the Fulton County election case — “was keenly interested in the doozy that was handed to me.”
The claim was based on a mistaken belief that it’s uncommon for people to share both the same name and date of birth. Recognizing the error, Block scrambled a message to his contact at the campaign: “DO NOT ALLOW THIS [analysis] TO GO OUT.” After a brief argument with a Trump attorney in Nevada, the campaign eventually spiked the suit.
In at least a few cases, Block believes he did find likely evidence of voter fraud. By August 2021, he found 167 votes scattered across 40 different states that were potentially valid examples of illegal double voting. When he asked whether he should report the evidence to law enforcement, he writes that the Trump campaign, which was so vocal about the issue of voter fraud, told him not to do so.
“It didn’t serve the greater purpose that the campaign was facilitating at the time, which was showing that massive voter fraud had occurred,” Block says. “If they only delivered a couple hundred fraudulent votes scattered across the swing states, they’re almost sealing their own doom with the voter fraud narrative.”
The experience of trying to vet the wild misinformation that shaped the Trump campaign’s perception of reality has left Block keen not just to speak out about the bogus premises used by his former employers to try and overturn the election. It’s also turned him into an advocate for reforming an election system whose complexities he believes can help provide fuel for such bogus conspiracy theories.
He points to dead voters — a frequent source of false claims about voter fraud — as an example.
“If you have the misfortune of dying before the Election Day, does your vote count or does it not count?” Block asks. “It depends on which state you live in and sometimes on which county you live in within a specific state. Shouldn’t this situation have the same outcome everywhere in the country?”
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