By
About a year ago, The Washington Post reported on Donald Trump’s political operation having hired the Berkeley Research Group to scrutinize the 2020 presidential election after the Republican’s defeat. The purpose of the contract was obvious: The outgoing president and his team wanted the researchers to bolster Trump’s conspiracy theories about voter fraud and election irregularities.
That didn’t work out well: BRG couldn’t find any meaningful evidence. As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown joked, Trump “must have really hated that his campaign spent over $600,000 to be told he was wrong.”
But we later learned that the Berkeley Research Group wasn’t alone in tackling such an endeavor. Last April, the Post published a related report on Team Trump paying $750,000 to Simpatico Software Systems, which was also tasked with finding evidence of 2020 voter fraud. That didn’t go well, either: The company was unable to tell Republicans what they wanted to hear because the evidence simply didn’t exist.
It’s against this backdrop that Ken Block, the owner of Simpatico Software Systems, has a new op-ed in USA Today, which was published with a striking headline: “Trump paid me to find voter fraud. Then he lied after I found 2020 election wasn’t stolen.”
In November 2020, former President Donald Trump asserted that voter fraud had altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The day after the election, his campaign hired an expert in voter data to attempt to prove Trump’s allegations and put him back in the White House. I am the expert who was hired by the Trump campaign.
In his opinion piece, Block, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in his home state of Rhode Island, explained not only that his investigation failed to turn up meaningful evidence of voter fraud, but also that his company’s findings have been shared with congressional, federal and state investigators.
Block added that rank-and-file GOP voters have been fed “a steady diet of innuendo, misrepresentations and outright lies when it comes to the issue of voter fraud. ... Stories that set the record straight about election innuendo are not typically broadcast in right-leaning media, which means that millions of people receive no information to help them make a more informed decision about what happened in 2020.”
Obviously, it’s unrealistic to think the former president will see Block’s op-ed and change course. Indeed, we already know better: Trump and his team were presented with these findings many months ago. They kept lying anyway.
But pieces like these nevertheless stand out because of their potential impact on others. I’m well aware of the fact that many Republican voters are inclined to ignore official election results. And court rulings. And journalists. And scholars. And state and local election officials from both parties.
For the right, however, dismissing someone like Block shouldn’t be quite as easy. At issue is a Republican whose company was paid well by Team Trump to uncover evidence of voter fraud. It was in Block’s interest to deliver the results his powerful client wanted to see, but that proved impossible because the evidence simply didn’t exist.
It’s one thing when rank-and-file GOP voters reflexively ignore the reality-based community. But when weighing whether or not to believe conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, shouldn’t it matter that Trump’s own researchers concluded that the voter fraud claims were baseless?