Ken Block was surprised to get a phone call from an unfamiliar number one day after the 2020 election. It was a lawyer for Donald Trump’s campaign, and he wanted to know if Block would search for evidence of fraud in the election. Block ran as a third party candidate for governor in 2010 and as a Republican in 2014. But he’s also an expert in database technologies and data analytics — and that’s why the Trump campaign reached out to him. Block details his findings in a new book. So why has Trump not backed away from his lie about a stolen election? How can Americans move ahead when so many people disregard facts? And what needs to be done to strengthen the election process? This week, The Public’s Radio Political Reporter Ian Donnis goes in-depth with Ken Block, 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.”
Transcript:
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Ian Donnis: Welcome back to The Public’s Radio.
Ken Block: Thanks for having me.
Donnis: I’ll start with a funny story. I read most of your book last week when I was on vacation and we’ve known each other for a long time, so I could actually hear your voice in my head while I was reading it. But I really enjoyed your book. It’s very informative and I think even people who are very familiar with politics can learn a lot by reading it. Your book lays out how the 2020 election was free from widespread fraud that would have tilted the outcome. You were hired by the Trump campaign to assess this. You told the Trump people about your findings and they did not question your findings. Nonetheless, Donald Trump has continued to double down on the fictitious idea that the 2020 election was stolen. What do you make of that?
Block: It’s the difference between information and proof that can survive legal scrutiny versus statements that are political in nature. So, Trump’s comments about voter fraud are strictly political. They have no hope of ever withstanding legal scrutiny or being capable of being submitted as viable evidence in court. Whereas, the purpose of my hiring and what my job was, was to identify evidence of substantial enough fraud to have changed the election result that would have stood up in court. And everything that Trump talks about, almost all the claims of fraud that you hear just out in the wild are all hearsay evidence or totally unsupported by facts, and so with that, what that means is there’s just no hope of it actually being able to overcome and overturn an election result.
Donnis: Part of your motivation in writing this book seems to be from your belief that facts really matter. You know, as John Adams famously said, “facts are stubborn things.” But you also point to how we live in a time when people’s view of the 2020 election stems on whether they pledge allegiance to Donald Trump or take a more factually based analysis of the situation.
If confirmation bias is such a big problem in our current moment, how do we move past that?
Block: The only way you can move past confirmation bias is with facts, and it’s one of the key reasons that I wrote the book the way that I wrote it. And the reason that I wrote the book at all, honestly, was to bring forward the facts as they pertain to what really happened in 2020, why the claims of fraud that were everywhere were fundamentally wrong, and to bring forward the very basic reason why President Trump lost the election. Had he kept the RINOs on board, he would still be President Trump. I’m sure of that. But because he rejected RINOs, he threw them out of his orbit and they left, that was the difference in states like Georgia and Arizona and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Nevada.
Donnis: What is your assessment of the percentage of voters in Rhode Island, Republican or otherwise, who believe Trump’s lie about the 2020 election?
Block: Yeah, well, they’re not alone. There are tens of millions who do, and they are overwhelmed by information in conservative media that reinforces the idea that there was massive fraud, and they’re not really being presented with facts that can contradict the narrative, the false narrative of voter fraud, and it’s a huge problem. I’ve struggled to get my message heard on almost any conservative media up to this point, and that is also itself a fallout from confirmation bias. Not only do the people who are listening to conservative media only seek out information that makes them feel better about their positions, conservative media on its own is kind of trapped because if they want to keep their viewership and listenership, they have to provide the information that their viewers want to hear.
Donnis: The forward to your book was written by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He’s a Republican. Nonetheless, he and his family have faced death threats because they have not towed the line on Trump’s fake story about the 2020 election. He’s not alone. Other election workers in various states have faced threats. What do we do about this?
Block: I honestly think that things have calmed down a bit since the worst of it in 2020 and 2021. The consequences faced by the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th and the aggressive prosecution of people who launch threats against public officials, I think have thrown a little bit of cold water on the whole idea that political violence is acceptable. It’s still there. I think it’s less likely than it was a year ago even, and hopefully will continue to settle down and get back to a place where we can all accept factual evidence on its face and not act out because it doesn’t line up with what your beliefs are.
Donnis: What was the most surprising thing you learned in the course of doing your study for the Trump administration and in writing your book?
Block: Well, honestly, it was the fact that there was a group of Trump attorneys who were professional, who did their due diligence, and who wanted me to perform a straight up assessment of the facts as they pertain to the role that voter fraud played. As we negotiated my contract, I made sure to tell the lawyer that I negotiated with that, in ten years of looking at voter data, I had never encountered anything close to what I knew the campaign needed me to find, and I wanted him to understand that I wasn’t promising him a specific result, but that if the fraud existed, I would find it and it would be found in a way that would stand up in court, but if I didn’t find it, I didn’t find it. And his response to that was, “That’s exactly what we want.” And I think that’s the most newsworthy element of the whole book, that there were Trump attorneys, more than one, who wanted to know the facts, who didn’t want to be associated with false claims in court, and they did the right thing. It was great.
Donnis: One of the major themes in your book is that although widespread fraud is not changing the course of US elections, there’s a lot of room for improvement in how elections are conducted. How would you sketch that out for us?
Block: I think there’s a couple of things that are surprising to a lot of people when I talk about this and the key one is we don’t have 50 different election systems, one for each state. We have 5,000 different election systems because in most bigger states, the conduct of elections is pushed down to the county level. And in states like New York State, there are 62 different election systems, one for each county, and they do things differently from each other. And that is a problem, depending on what the thing is that gets done differently. And my favorite example of this is the scenario where you vote early by mail, say two weeks before the election, but then you die before election day. And the basic question is, well, should your vote count or does it not count? And the answer is, it depends on where you live. So in some states, there are laws that say the vote counts. In other states, there are laws that say the vote doesn’t count, and in the rest of the states, there’s no law about it. And Rhode Island is one of those states that doesn’t have a law, but we count the vote. And counting that vote without a law that says you should count the vote is kind of problematic. And for those who are wondering, well, does it matter? In Michigan, a state that does not count the vote, in 2020, 3,500 votes cast by early voters who died before election day were canceled. And for me, it’s fundamentally unfair that the voter experience, in this case, a deceased voter, but that’s beside the point, that a voter’s experience could be that dramatically different from place to place. We need some additional federal guidelines on things like this, so that we iron out these differences, and in states where, like Rhode Island gives the voter data for $25, well, Alabama charges $37,000 for their data, and that’s ridiculous, right? Alabama doesn’t want you looking at their data, and there’s no guidelines that say what a reasonable amount of money that should be charged. And in Massachusetts, forget it. You can’t get their voter data.
Donnis: You make the point in your book that, if we were to start all over and use contemporary technology to draw up the election system, it would be totally different. But this complexity that you’re describing and the incredible variability seems to make it an enormous lift to change things, despite some proposals that you make that seem kind of grounded in common sense. Do you have any optimism given gridlock in Congress and the hyper partisanship of our age that we will see an effort to really improve elections along what you propose?
Block: So, the fact that HR 1 existed, that was an election reform bill that came out, I think two years ago. It never, I think it passed the house but didn’t pass the Senate or vice versa. I can’t remember which way. That was a compromise bill. It was a good bill. It didn’t go through, but the fact that it made it through one chamber is good. I’ve had Republican secretaries of state, I’ve had Democratic secretaries of state, as we discuss the book and the proposals, I can see where there’s tremendous overlap on both sides in terms of the proposals that I have. There is a compromise to be had. There are things that we can do. And honestly, it’s one of the most important things that we could do in our elections, is to modernize how we do it. Because really what we’re doing right now is what we did 200 years ago, except with some computer systems, some good, some bad, in the middle, and we deserve much better than that. And we can get there. I know Congress can’t agree on a lunch order right now, and that’s a problem, but I’m hopeful that if we can get everybody together and explain what needs to be done, explain how it’s good from a nonpartisan perspective, I’m hopeful that we can make some change.
Donnis: You twice ran for governor in Rhode Island. You remain a concerned citizen. You’ve been observing the state and its politics for some time. I wonder what you think about what is holding back the Republican Party here from being more competitive, and what you think should be done differently to foster a stronger economy here
Block: Those are two pretty, pretty broad questions.
Donnis: With about a minute and a half left.
Block: Solve world hunger in 30 seconds. You know, the Republican Party struggles here because the party itself has factions just like it does at the national level. There are very hard right conservatives here. There are middle of the road conservatives. They don’t necessarily like each other, they don’t see eye to eye, the party’s not cohesive. The Democratic Party has some of these similarities as well, but the Republicans are vastly outnumbered in this state. And, minus a big migration of conservative minded people here, I don’t see how that changes. From how we make our economy better, the General Assembly has to stop scaring the pants off of business. And when bad bills come up that are hostile to business, business owners who aren’t here look at these proposals and say, “There’s no way I’m going to expose my company, my employees, my personal financial well being to the vagaries of a general assembly that could very easily pass a bill that could eviscerate businesses that are here.” It’s one of the biggest problems we have.
Donnis: All right. We’ll leave it there. Ken Block, 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.” Thank you very much for joining us.
Block: Thank you.
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The days when a smaller number of authoritative sources ruled the media are long gone. Many Americans now tend to seek our information sources that reinforce their own views, and the media spectrum has fractured into a profusion of choices in the internet age. To some, this marks an era of “media shards,” in which a half-dozen or so groups with similar views gather about the same information watercooler. But can Americans reach consensus given the fracturingh in the media landscape over the past 30 years? You can read more about that in my Friday TGIF column posting around 4 this afternoon on what used to be known as Twitter @IanDon and at thepublicsradio.org/tgif