It was only minutes after the Trump-Harris debate on September 10 that Trump appeared outside the media spin room saying that two unidentified polls he had checked showed he won the debate 92 to 6 & 88 to 11 respectively. Although neither Trump or Harris said anything of substance during the debate, when real statistical results came out on average it was Harris 67 - Trump 33. But Trump persisted saying it was his best debate performance ever. When his friend Lindsey Graham was asked in the spin room which part of the debate he liked best Graham replied "Trump's closing statement," many thinking Graham was indicating he was glad the debate was over.
A mini-parallel can be drawn between Trump's debate claim & his false claim about the 2020 presidential election being stolen. According to Trump he never loses. A golden thread in all the claims is that no evidence to back up his claims is ever produced.
For instance, a few days after the 2020 election a story surfaced that a truck delivered hundreds of thousands of ballots for Biden from New York to Pennsylvania. The ballots, the truck, or the driver were never produced. The story just faded away.
Now there are plenty of stories about election claims that are not as well known as the above mysterious truck claim & Ken Block did a very good job in his book entitled Disproven of explaining the ones he was hired by the Trump campaign to work on.
Click on image to enlargeKen has a degree in computer science from Dartmouth & is an expert in database technologies & data analytics whose specialty is digging into a large data set, figuring out what questions can be answered by the data, & then letting the data take him wherever it leads. Ken's analysis has been used in multiple lawsuits regarding the conduct of elections. See page 15 of Disproven.
Ken was approached the day after the 2020 election, unsolicited, by Alex Cannon, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, to have Ken's firm Simpatico Software Systems investigate the claims of massive fraud that the Trump campaign thought existed in the 2020 presidential election. On November 5, 2020 Ken signed a contract to look for voter fraud in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, & Wisconsin. The list soon expanded to include Michigan.
The work consisted of data mining (i.e., the process of searching & analysing a large batch of raw data in order to identify patterns & extract useful information) for voter fraud. In the initial assignment Ken was to concentrate on deceased voter fraud & finding people who voted in multiple states. Ken assured Cannon that the work done by Simpatico would be of sufficient quality to stand up in a court of law.
It didn't take long before the initial assignment expanded again to include the investigation of specific claims presented to Ken by Cannon. Obviously, like the above mysterious truck claim, the new ones presented by Cannon were hashed out @ campaign meetings following the election. Members of Team Trump drew up or worked out the new claims as more information, reliable & unreliable, became available.
There was a second firm, the Berkeley Research Group (BRG), that had produced voter data work directly to the White House instead of the campaign. BRG found no massive fraud that would have changed the election result. Obviously Ken did not know this during his investigation which was conducted simultaneously.
An example from Ken's original assignment was to investigate the claim that 16,097 voters had cast ballots in the battleground state of Nevada plus other states - i.e., double votes. A lawsuit was being prepared that would be based on Ken's data analysis if it supported the claim. Ken found there were 299 confirmed exact matches with the same voter in Nevada & another state. This number was too small to affect the election result in Nevada & the lawsuit was never presented.
But there is more. Although Ken did not have the time working for the Trump campaign in November 2020 to check further he did come back to this example in writing Disproven. Ken suspected that the 299 exact matches were duplicate registered voters which is not illegal because a voter can legally have active voter registrations in two states. It is only a crime if that voter casts a ballot in each state,
After Ken did a deeper statistical dive regarding the matter, the bottom line is that a total of four people cast double votes in Nevada & California & all four people were registered Republicans in both states. Not 16,097. Not 299. But four people double voted in Nevada & California - & all four were registered Republicans in both states.
An example from Ken's expanded assignment list (to address claims the Team Trump campaign members brought up as time moved along) involved the application of Benford's Law - the mathematical observation that in large datasets the first digit in those numbers is likely to be closer to 1 than to 9. For instance when counting from 1 to 25 the number 1 is the first digit 11 times, the number 2 is the first digit 7 times, & the numbers 3 to 9 are all the first digit once each. If the data being analyzed is large enough Benford's Law is a mathematical certainty & "the American court system accepts Benford's Law as a tool to highlight fraudulent transactions." - Disproven page 56.
In short, Benford's law describes the relative frequency distribution for leading digits of numbers in datasets.
Click here to see the mathematical derivation of Benford's Law done @ the Naval Academy. The derivation result is that Benford's Law shows the probability that the leading digit of a number N can be calculated as log (1+1/N). Example for N = 1: log (1+1/1) = log (2) = 30.1% when expressed as a percent. See graphic below for the entire distribution of the nine digits 1 to 9.
Click on graphic to enlargeSpecifically, Ken's work involving Benford's Law started on November 11, 2020 when Attorney Cannon called Ken to ask him to analyze Pennsylvania county vote totals because some members of Team Trump did not believe the data followed Benford's Law - which, if true, & if applicable would mean voter fraud had occurred.
Ken analyzed the Pennsylvania county vote counts & found it indeed did not follow Benford's Law's distribution when plotted on a graph like the one above. Further analysis found that Pennsylvania county populations also did not plot in accordance with Benford's Law & neither did the registered voter counts by county. Lastly, Ken plotted the first digit of every street number for every address (over 8.75 million) in the Pennsylvania voter registration file & found it matched the Benford Law distribution.
The next day during a conference call Ken presented his conclusion that the claim was false by telling the group "since the population sizes by Pennsylvania counties don't conform to Benford's Law, no one could credibly expect the county vote totals to conform." Page 62 of Disproven.
Ken knew the disappointment the people on the other end of the call had because they so wanted to believe they had found some real evidence of fraud that would help Trump. The call, & any possibility of a legal claim, ended when someone on the conference call said "We are done here."
On page 58 of Disproven Ken writes "Benford's Law must be applied against sets of 'appropriate' data. The data against which the theory is used should be random, & the data set should be large." Team Trump members were not qualified or equipped to evaluate the validity of highly technical claims which is why Cannon hired Ken in the first place.
In Disproven Ken details other false claims he worked on for the Trump campaign such as: 1) did 740,070 voters in Wisconsin double vote? - once by mail & once by machine; claim made by a group of volunteers who analyzed Wisconsin's voter data file, 2) whether or not voters in Pennsylvania voted by mail after they had died, 3) were nearly 100,000 mail ballots in Pennsylvania fraudulently requested?, 4) did noncitizens vote in Arizona?, & 5) was there a legion of votes cast by both dead & double voters.
In summary, Ken wrote on page 114 of Disproven that "every voter fraud claim presented to me by the Trump campaign was disproven." The lawyers working on the Trump campaign who hired Ken dropped the claims Ken refuted but Trump held to the stolen election assertion - even today.
Regarding the original assignment to in general look for voter fraud in six swing states Ken found that Trump overwhelmingly won the smaller (even tiny) population counties across the county but lost 80% of the large population counties. Ken found that "Trump took a smaller percentage of the votes compared to his Democrat challenger almost everywhere in 2020 compared to 2016," performing "more poorly in 2020 in all but three red states (Arkansas, Florida, & Utah)." Ken called this "bleeding support." See my table of such results for Arizona, Georgia, & Wisconsin below.
Ken found that Libertarian Party presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen earned more votes than Biden's margin of victory in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, & Wisconsin.
The idea that Trump motivated new voters to vote for him in 2016 & motivated even more voters to vote against him in 2020 is borne out by Trump receiving over 11 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 but Biden receiving over 15 million more votes than Hillary. There were over 4.6 million fewer third party candidate votes in 2020 than in 2016. The Trump increase in percent of total vote from 2016 to 2020 was 0.69% while the Democrat candidate increased 3.04% (see page 130 of Disproven). Ken used this national data as a backdrop as he analyzed all 50 states & DC, drilling down to the county level in the six swing states, to see the dynamic that led to Biden's electoral college victory. Trump's 2020 vote margin in the six swing states averaged 2.58% lower than his vote margin in 2016 (see page 134 of Disproven).
There is a chapter in Disproven devoted to analyzing mail fraud - how the mail ballots were handled, the total number of mail ballots that were spoiled, the total number of mail ballots rejected & why (e.g., missed deadline, missing or bad signature, no witness signature, multiple ballots in an envelope, required ID not provided, voter deceased, & mail ballot rejected because a vote had already been cast).
Ken summed up this section of Disproven on page 137 saying "I was paid by the Trump campaign to look for evidence of massive fraud in the election data & that I found nothing that came close to proving that large-scale voter fraud occurred in those six states. I have shown that Trump took a performance hit literally across the nation when looking @ statewide election data."
After finding no massive voter fraud Ken wondered why Trump continued (continues) to claim there was. His answer is the same as mine presented in the referenced post below when I wrote "Starting in July 2020 Trump set the stage for his post-election claims of fraud & court appeals when @ one of his signature rallies he presented an out of character scenario in which he raised the possibility of him losing the election - he gave the excuse of losing because of voter fraud. I remember, watching live, thinking to myself, if he knows all of these details of potential fraud why doesn't he do something about it now - months before the election? This way he could win."
Ken wrote on page 122 of Disproven that "this sagging support (i.e., shown by all of Ken's extensive work & the examples I provide in the table below) must have been known to Trump's campaign team well before the 2020 election."
I believe it was known & wrote in the reference post below "But one poll after another had continuously & repeatedly shown Biden winning the presidency by large margins. I believe Trump's internal polling showed him losing also, especially in the important swing states that he had won in 2016 by very narrow margins. It makes sense that Kellyanne Conway not only told him that he lost after the election, as she wrote in her recent book, but most likely also told him that he was going to lose before she left the White House in August 2020 - why else would the only woman who had successfully guided a presidential campaign to victory resign shortly before her chance @ a second victory."
Ken also felt the time to do something about suspected fraud was before the election. Ken writes on page 85 of Disproven "States where the margins of victory are expected to be close should be identified well in advance of the election, & their voter registration data should be carefully examined; problems with the data can be corrected & potentially have a meaningful impact - before votes are cast. Of course, no preparatory work occurred before Election Day to help the Trump campaign evaluate the election results in the search for voter fraud. The entire effort, from my vantage point, was reactive & unplanned."
But not having the qualifications to analyze large datasets did not stop people like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Mark Meadows, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, & the late Lou Dobbs from doing so. As time went on & one claim of excessive election fraud after another fell through, Rudy & Sid's claims became ever more preposterous & desperate. Out of what today looks to be a cult-like loyalty to Trump these people pitifully, blindly, & willingly put their professional reputations on the line for virtually "anything that could impugn the election & create a narrative that massive fraud occurred." Page 63 Disproven.
Because of Rudy's misplaced loyalty to Trump he has been forced to file for bankruptcy (defamation case in Georgia) & has been disbarred in both New York & Washington, D.C. Sid pleaded guilty in the Georgia election subversion case. As part of her guilty plea Sid faces six years of probation & will be required to testify @ future trials, write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, pay nearly $9,000 in restitution, & turn over documents. Jenna Ellis, after being censured by a Colorado judge, signed a plea deal & legal acknowledgement that she "made a number of public statements about the November 2020 presidential election that were false" & did so with a "reckless state of mind" & with "a selfish motive." Ellis admitted in state disciplinary proceedings that she made at least 10 false statements about the 2020 election as part of an effort to mislead the public, according to court documents. Mark Meadows has signed immunity deals regarding future litigation. FNC made a $787 million settlement payment for deliberately & knowingly presenting false information on air regarding Dominion voting machines rigging the 2020 presidential election for Biden. Newsmax & One America News have made undisclosed settlement payments to Smartmatic for similar charges - Smartmatic has a pending lawsuit against FNC. Dominion has ongoing defamation lawsuits against Newsmax, One America News, & individual Trump supporters.
It is obvious that none of these people's lives will ever be the same.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State, wrote in the Foreword to Disproven that Trump lost Georgia because he received less votes than the fourteen Republican congressional candidates in the general election. Many readers will remember I made a detailed tabulation (see referenced post below) of congressional district voting not only for Georgia but for Wisconsin & Arizona as well. See tabulation below. Click here to see the Table entitled Presidential & House Vote Count By Congressional District - 2020.
So Trump continues, four years later, to discount all of the above information & not only say he won the 2020 election but demand that his vice president say so also. Vance not only supports the stolen election lie but has indicated he would not have done what Pence did on January 6 & presumably as vice president would have found a way for Trump to have won the 2020 presidential election. Vance outrageously said that "I would have told the states . . . that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, & I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there." This malady ruined Vance's October 1 VP debate performance when @ the end of the debate he would not answer whether or not Trump lost the 2020 election in what Tim Walz called a damning non-answer.
We have no reason to believe that if Trump wins on November 5 he will not continue the disgraceful way he left office in January 2021.
Reference Post: Fresh Faces Needed In 2024 For The Good Of The Country
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