Report for Trump campaign undercut claims of voting fraud

When then-President Donald Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, in a now-infamous bid to overturn the 2020 election, he alleged that thousands of dead people had voted in the state.

“So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number, and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters,” he said, without citing his study.

But a report commissioned by his own campaign dated one day prior told a different story: Researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence” of only nine dead voters in Fulton County, defined as ballots that may have been cast by someone else in the name of a deceased person. They believed there was a “potential statewide exposure” of 23 such votes across the Peach State – or 4,977 fewer than the “minimum” Trump claimed.

In a separate failed bid to overturn the results in Nevada, Trump’s lawyers said in a court filing that 1,506 ballots were cast in the names of dead people and 42,284 voted twice. Trump lost the Silver State by about 33,000 votes.

The researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence” that 12 ballots were cast in the names of deceased people in Clark County, Nev., and believed the “high end potential exposure” was 20 voters statewide – some 1,486 fewer than Trump’s lawyers said.

According to their research, the “low end potential exposure” of double voters was 45, while the “high end potential exposure” was 9,063. The judge tossed the Nevada case even as Trump continued to claim he won the state.

The “Project 2020” report conducted by the Berkeley Research Group has now been obtained by prosecutors investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A copy was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it shows that Trump’s own campaign paid more than $600,000 for research that undercut many of his most explosive claims. The research was never made public.

The Justice Department has sought and obtained multiple reports, emails and interviews from witnesses that show campaign officials analyzing, and often discrediting, claims that Trump was making publicly, according to several people involved in the investigation, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal details. The Berkeley report was provided to the Justice Department earlier this month, one of the people said, after some people involved in its crafting received a subpoena.

The Berkeley report, which is written in technical jargon, was handled through an intermediary: It was commissioned by Kasowitz Benson Torres, a Trump-associated law firm, and conducted by East Bay Advisory, a subsidiary of the Berkeley Research Group, according to the copy reviewed by The Post. But the report, labeled “privileged and confidential,” states on its third page that the “client” was the campaign of Donald J. Trump

For President. The draft obtained by The Post was labeled a “summary report” and dated Jan. 1.

The Berkeley report was an object of frustration to some of Trump’s advisers, who were looking for evidence of widespread fraud – and an object of validation for others, who wanted him to stop spreading lies about the election. A meeting between the Berkeley team, Trump and Trump’s team grew tense in December, people familiar with the meeting said.

The Berkeley report never explicitly says who won the election, but it goes through a series of allegations from Trump’s team and either disputes them or does not provide enough evidence to overturn the election.

Trump has repeatedly said there was no way he lost the 2020 election, saying there were illegal vote “dumps.”