Donald Trump hired him to find voting fraud. He debunked it instead

ATLANTA — Four years ago, Donald Trump insisted that voting fraud cost him the election, and he hired Ken Block to prove it.

A data analyst, Block did his best, searching for dead voters, double-voting and absentee ballot fraud. But he found only about a dozen examples of fraud in Georgia — far short of the 11,780 votes Trump needed to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.

“We have all these unfounded claims of voter fraud,” Block told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “There are so many that it’s hard to believe it’s not true. But the reality is, it’s not true.”

Block took an interest in elections after running twice for Rhode Island governor. He lost both times but gained expertise studying voter registration and other election data.

That’s why the Trump campaign called him the day after the 2020 election and asked him to review fraud allegations in Georgia and five other swing states Biden won.

Block took the job. In the weeks that followed he did his own research and reviewed the work of other analysts. But he found himself debunking — not proving — fraud allegations.

One example: Block reviewed a Trump campaign analysis that claimed thousands of people had illegally voted twice — once in Georgia and again in another state.

The analyst had compared voting data from Georgia and other states, matching people by their names and birth dates. Block found the analyst had mistakenly assumed that different people with the same name and similar birth dates were the same person.

In a country of more than 330 million people, many people have the same names. Block said he has found some 15,000 “John Smiths” registered to vote in the United States. He’s also found 72 “Ken Blocks” — not an especially common name.

Making accurate matching more difficult: Publicly available Georgia registration data includes only the voter’s birth year. Block said matches only on a name and year of birth are wrong “99% of the time.” Even with a full date of birth, the matches are wrong more than 90% of the time, he said.

Block determined the Trump analyst wrongly concluded that thousands of people cast ballots in Georgia and another state. He found similar problems with allegations of dead voters, absentee ballot fraud and other claims.

“Every single claim they asked me to look at was false,” he said.

Block said the Trump campaign lawyers he worked with accepted his analysis. In March, he published a book about his hunt for voting fraud called “Disproven.”

But four years after the election, Block said many people still believe it was stolen “because President Trump continues to bang the drum” of voting fraud and conservative media outlets continue to echo his complaints.

“They don’t provide their listeners any contrary information to that narrative,” he said. “I’ve tried to tell my story in conservative media, and nobody will have me.”

Block said the reason Trump lost is more mundane than voting fraud.

Many moderate Republicans who voted for him in 2016 didn’t vote for him four years later. Between 2016 and 2020, Trump lost more than enough support in the deepest red counties in Georgia and other swing states to account for Biden’s margin of victory, Block said.