R.I. author spells out why Trump really lost in 2020
In ‘Disproven,’ Block tells about his search for fraud
PROVIDENCE — In December 2020, Donald Trump’s campaign asked Ken Block, a software engineer and former Rhode Island gubernatorial candidate, to examine a claim that more than 740,000 voters in Wisconsin had cast duplicate votes.
“That was by far the most bonkers claim that I had to deal with,” Block said on the Rhode Island Report podcast. “A group of self-described ‘volunteers’ did a really bad set of data analytics. They wanted the Department of Justice to swoop in and, I guess, start trucking people out of the state in handcuffs.”
Those volunteers brought their erroneous conclusion to the manager of a Trump golf course, who brought the claim to Trump’s son Eric, who brought the claim to Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon. Cannon brought the claim to Block.
“It took me about an hour to discover where they had made their error,” Block said. “And it’s indicative of a lot of the claims that I received.”
In hiring Block, the Trump campaign never asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. And the result is a new book, released last Tuesday, titled “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.”
Block, a Barrington resident, is the founder of the Moderate Party of Rhode Island who ran for governor as a moderate in 2010 and as a Republican in 2014. He is the president of Simpatico Software Systems Inc. and the founder of a nonprofit called Watchdog RI.
He helped Texas build the first statewide online “food stamp” system, which saved more than $1 billion in waste and fraud over 15 years. And in 2017, he brought findings of potential voter fraud to a meeting of Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
In November 2020, Block received a call from Cannon, the Trump campaign lawyer, asking him to look for voter fraud. “I sort of did a double take and had a look on my face that had my wife and my daughter fairly concerned,” he recalled.
Block ended up signing a contract on Nov. 5, 2020. “I realized that this represented a unique opportunity to audit a national election with virtually unlimited resources available to me, and that is probably a once in a lifetime thing,” he said. “I said, ‘If it’s there, I’ll find it. But if it’s not there, I’m going to tell you it’s not there.’”
As it turned out, it was not there. “Not only did we not find massive voter fraud, we didn’t find enough voter fraud to impact an election — in any of the swing state elections,” Block said. “Every one of those claims I was able to prove were false, and even though 60-plus lawsuits were filed in November and December of 2020, many more would have been filed if the work that I did for the campaign had not been done.”
Block said the middle of his book focuses on explaining why Trump lost the 2020 election.
“The reason I know that Trump lost is because he lost the the middle-of-the-road Republicans,” he said. “He lost the country club Republicans, the Rockefeller Republicans. He told them to take off. He denigrated them as RINOS [Republicans In Name Only], and they didn’t vote for him.”
Block’s book is coming out in the wake of Trump’s Super Tuesday wins and Nikki Haley’s decision to drop out of the Republican primary. “[Trump] actually told Nikki Haley supporters not that long ago to get lost,” he said. “He’s continuing to shrink his base of support, and that base of support is not enough to win the general election.”
The book’s final portion makes recommendations for improving the nation’s electoral system, which he describes as “deeply flawed.”
“Republicans hate the front of my book, but they’re going to love the back of my book,” Block said. “Democrats love the front of my book, and they’re not going to be so hot about the back of my book. So I’ve got something for everybody to like and everybody to hate, which means I’m either going to sell a lot of books or none.”
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