The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – 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 by Ken Block

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

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 by Ken Block https://amzn.to/4aqniqn Many searched for evidence of voter fraud in 2020, only a few were unbiased professionals . . . and only one has written a book about his experience. If you value the integrity of our elections—or want a behind-the-scenes look at an attempt at overturning one—Disproven by Ken Block takes you out of the voting booth and into the chaos that was the attempt to challenge the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In November 2020, data specialist Ken Block received a phone call from the Trump Campaign. They wanted to hire him to find evidence of election fraud. What followed were late night and early morning requests to assess fraud claims at a blistering pace and ultimately find definitive evidence about the role voter fraud played in the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Multiple subpoenas later, Block reveals the truth about being one of the few professionals hired to prove the Trump Campaign’s allegation that voter fraud cost Donald Trump the 2020 presidential election. He explains what the voter data tells us and exposes the sobering truth that our federal elections are operating on hundreds, if not thousands, of disparate voting systems prone to error—a threat to national election integrity. Disproven is an insider’s look at the results of an inflammatory claim, a flawed system, and the changes drastically needed before the results of another election are threatened or contested.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. There Iron Lady sings and that makes it official. Welcome to the big show.

We certainly appreciate you guys having us on your radios or your dials. Do people still have radios? On your devices, wherever you're listening to the Chris Voss Show. For 16 years, we've been bringing you the smartest people in the world, the great authors, the Pulitzer Prize winners, the CEOs, the billionaires. In fact, listen to our recent billionaire interview from two weeks ago. And we've got an amazing mind on the show who was involved in one of the most recent voter, voter, what would you call it? Voting issues. We'll just call it. And it made news and was a popular thing. So we're going to get into it. And it may be some memories for you

as well. We have the author of the book, 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. It's just come out March 12th, 2024. Ken Block is on the show with us today. We're going to be talking to him about his insights, his knowledge, and what he was hired to do and what he found. Ken Block is an expert in voter data. He's a technology entrepreneur, a two-time candidate for governor of Rhode Island, advocate for good government, and founder of a centrist political party.

He founded Simpatico Software Systems in 2001. His work in data analytics uncovered the truth of how our elections are conducted and was the basis for legal action regarding the 2020 presidential election. The lead attorney of former U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on the January 6th attack that he had complete confidence in Block's work. Block has been credited in helping Texas save more than a billion dollars in food stamp fraud and efficiencies. It wasn't me. He lives in Rhode Island with his family.

Welcome to the show, Ken. How are you? Chris, thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming. We really appreciate it. And this is going to be really insightful. I'm glad you wrote this book to help. You know, there's a few conspiracies running around these days on everything, really. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? My author's webpage is KenBlock.com, K-E-N-B-L-O-C-K. For the book, it's Disproven.com, just the way it sounds. And for my business, if anyone wanted to hit that, it's Sympatico Software Systems, S-I-M.

And the rest is what you would expect. There you go. And I noticed the foreword is written by Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State that everyone should be familiar with, especially with what's going on with the trial in Georgia. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your new book? I've been told I have the longest subtitle in book history. But what the book is about, it's really three different sections. It documents and details the work I performed for the Trump campaign in the 35 days immediately after the election. They hired me to look for voter fraud, to look for evidence of

enough deceased voters, enough voters who voted twice, once in the swing states and once in some other state to have impacted one of the swing state elections. And then while that work was happening, I had earned the trust and confidence of the Trump campaign lawyers that I reported to who were not what you think the campaign lawyers were when you think Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and John Eastman, not those lawyers. These are a different group of careful lawyers that I work for. Yeah, and we'll get to that. But they started delivering to me claims of voter fraud that other people had made. And to their great credit and the credit of the lawyers that I reported to, they wanted their due diligence performed. They wanted me to look at these claims and determine if they

were valid or not before they got rolled into a lawsuit. And I did that over and over and over again. And every time I did it, I was able to show the lawyers why the claim was false. And collectively, we stopped a number of lawsuits from happening. There you go. But you didn't have to deal with the whole Rudy Giuliani end of it and forget the other crazy lady. Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman. I was delivered some claims that those lawyers were backing, but I never interacted with any of them in any kind of direct way or in any way, honestly, not even through. I think you get your rabies shot after you do. So that's probably, you know, I was very for i was very fortunate because the lawyer i reported to his name is

alex cannon his name will come up a lot in our conversation today as we were hammering out my contract which we did very quickly he told me that because he wanted an honest straight up assessment of the data that i was looking at. He wanted to protect my identity and make sure it was not known in the White House who was performing this work. The White House knew the work was being performed, but they didn't know that my company was doing it, which kept the political pressures away from me that, as we all know, would have been brought to bear had they known that I was the one doing the work. Oh, you would have been all over TV, and you would have been, I don't know.

The Rudy Giuliani, what was the thing where he ended up in the front of the lawn care place? Four Seasons Lawn Care. Four Seasons Lawn Care. And, I mean, he's made those people rich. They've turned that into a brand. And at that lawn care place, they've got a whole, like an online YouTube channel,

I think it's tough now. But, you know, the oil dripping down the side, you know, anybody appeared with him, he just damaged their reputation, involved them in lawsuits. What was the other thing? Him farting in, I think it was the Pennsylvania. I missed that one.

There's actually a video you can see. I think he's in front of the Pennsylvania or Michigan state legislature. He's claiming all this voter fraud. And that young lady is sitting next to him who pled guilty in Georgia. And he literally lets out a bunch of farts. And he's in a mic. So it's just like, and you can see that she's probably, it's probably the most comfortable thing to sit next to a farting vampire.

But that being said, let's learn a little bit about you. We like to go through our authors, too. People like to get to know you better. So tell us what led you down this path. You set up your first company in 2001. What got you interested in this sort of business and down this road? How'd you grow up? Who hurt you?

That sort of thing. Wow, okay. In 30 seconds or less. So I went to Dartmouth College. I majored in computer science. The way I found myself there was my mother's cousin was a man named Alan Perlman, and he invented one of the first music synthesizers. And when I was in high school, he bought me an Apple II computer, one of the very first ones that came out. I started messing around with it. I liked it. And that really set me on my path all the way through my,

certainly my college career and my entire adult life. I have worked in computers continuously since graduating, taking on early on in my career, what we call in the industry, architectural responsibilities for designing large, complex systems. I was one of the main architects of the country's first online food stamp system that was delivered by debit cards to the state of Texas. It was called and still is called the Lone Star Card. We built systems like that and supported them for years in Texas and Illinois and for the government of Puerto Rico and some counties in California. I like playing with big databases, big sets of information and letting that information talk to me, if you will, and leading me where it leads. And that love of big data has led me into engagements with governments,

data mining for waste and fraud in government benefit programs. We've done lots of work over the years, when I say we collectively, my company, in the gaming industry, and we've delivered software for many different gaming applications over the years. And then I got interested in politics fairly late in life. And whether it's good or bad is hard to say. Depends who you ask in my family. But I started a new political party. I needed to run for governor to keep the party alive after we had to sue the state of Rhode Island in federal court to allow the new party to even try to be formed. I was successful at keeping the party alive, getting six and a half percent of the vote. I realized I was actually pretty good

at debates and I liked the policy elements of politics. And I had lots of ideas and I was all excited and was interested in continuing my political career. And I did. In 2014 or 2013, I declared my candidacy for governor again, this time running as a Republican, because in those years from 2010 to 2014, I realized that most voters have no idea what a party other than the Democrats and Republicans means, what it is, they're afraid of it, they don't trust it. It's hard to get candidates, it's hard to raise money. And there was a thousand reasons why it wasn't a great way to practice politics. I live in a state that's one of the most heavily Democrat states in the country, and I'm a government reformer. I like to see change made, and it's pretty hard to make change

from inside the Democratic machine, which is how i landed as a registered republican in 2013 to help my race for governor i lost my statewide primary by 3 000 votes as i'm very fond of saying voter fraud was not the reason i lost oh wow thank you for being honest about it and so you that kind of gave you a first insight into voter operations, how people vote. Probably, you know, you get the poll reports, you get all the reports. Jack Ramison asked us, and I think it's kind of clear from your book and stuff. So to be clear, you unbiasedly support the election's integrity. I suppose that's a fair question to throw out. Election integrity is a really loaded word.

It didn't used to be. And I think it's important to define it the way i understand it not the way it's being used right now election integrity is not a code word for election denialism even though it's being used that way now that's not what it really means election integrity refers to ensuring that our elections, the foundational elements of our elections, are as strong as they can be. And while I will, and while I have stated as bluntly as is possible, that voter fraud was not to blame for Trump's loss in 2020, and I have the evidence to back that up, I do believe that there are things that we can do

to strengthen our election integrity using the proper definition of what election integrity means. And we're going to get into this a little, I'm sure as we get a little bit down the road in this interview, but we do some things in our elections that make no sense whatsoever. And they lead to really not just odd, but extraordinarily unfair and improper outcomes, not in terms of electing the wrong person, but making the voter experience one that shouldn't be anywhere near what it is, and it could be much better. And so that's what I believe election integrity is. If the question more properly framed was, do I support any form of election denialism? I do not. Do I support very necessary changes to our election system to make it representative of the age in which we live? 100% because a lot of the way we conduct our elections, you can work backward through time and see that's how we did it 200 years ago and it's not the best way to do it today there you go jack even says thank you for clarifying that so he's he sounds supportive of that you know even william barr appears as a praise for your book

and of course bren ben brad rath is rath pensperger it's easy to say it than is to think it to read it evidently he's got one long name there. Not as long as my subtitle. That's true. That's true. I don't know what it is, but we interview a lot of authors lately, and they all have long subtitles. I think they do it for Google SEO search. So there you go. But maybe you might have the longest come to to look at it but i don't know it helps get picked up so your book leads off with you being hired by the trump campaign tell us how this goes down and and how you begin this journey yeah it was a warm november afternoon i was on the back porch with my

family and my cell phone rang from a dc phone number and I didn't recognize the number, didn't recognize the name that came up. I answered it. And Alex, who I'd referred to earlier, who was the campaign attorney I reported to, introduced himself quickly and got right to it and asked me if I would help the campaign look for voter fraud. And my wife tells me that my mouth basically hung open to my waist, basically. And I just sort of sat there with a vacant look in my eyes as he talked. And when he finished, I basically was able to burp out that, thanks for reaching out. Let me think about it and I'll get back to you. Got off the phone and my wife and daughter were like, what? And I said, you're not

going to believe this phone call. And I explained it and we talked it out. My daughter wondered why I would do it. And I said, having thought about it for a while, I didn't immediately have any of these answers, but it represented a unique opportunity to perform an audit, a national audit in real time of an election with virtually unlimited resources, which I had access to. That's probably a once in a lifetime opportunity. I don't know that anyone's ever going to be asked to do this again because it ended up being so ineffective at finding what they wanted. And I also, as I explained it to my wife and daughter, I could do this work dispassionately and letting the data show me where it went. And they said, what if you find massive fraud? I said, if I find massive

fraud, I want to be the guy who found massive fraud. That's a major thing to do. And yeah, I want to do it. But if I don't find massive fraud, that's what the campaign is going to hear from me. And I knew that most of the other people that they probably would have turned to to look for it wouldn't have come at it from that same vantage point. And so, therefore, you know, that was really what I needed to be comfortable going off and doing it. And as I negotiated the contract with Alex, one of the first things I told him was I said, look, I don't want any misconceptions about what I think is going to happen here. I've been looking at voting data for a decade and not once have I found anything close to what I know you need me to find. And I don't want you or anybody else attached to the campaign thinking that I'm promising a result. I'm not.

I'll promise you I won't leave any stone unturned. I promise you I'm going to tell you exactly the way it is, but I'm not going to custom deliver a specific set of findings that you want. And Alex's response to that was, that's perfect. That's what I want. He told me he wanted actual due diligence because if his name was going to be attached to a lawsuit he it had to be based upon good data and great for him and it's a very little known fact that there was a camp of lawyers working for the trump campaign

that did things the right way there you go so it sounds like there was like two tracks of lawyers there was the pr so lawyers the rudy giuliani's and then there was like two tracks of lawyers There was the PR, so lawyers, the Rudy Giuliani's And then there was you guys just quietly operating behind the scenes And they were keeping you secret So that, you know, you weren't getting calls from Donald, I guess Or Eric or anybody, correct Oh, damn, that's, Eric's, those are the best calls there He usually wants to know how to how to put the

the square block in the circle hole I'm just kidding sorry Eric but the so you how do you go about this because I mean the the reports or you know I don't know how much this was fanfare but you know there's like they're they're claiming tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of voter fraud you know I, I mean, this is a lot of cases. I mean, like you saw Arizona where they did that little game where they were going through all the votes. I mean, this is a lot of stuff to go through, right? What the contract asked me to do was to look for evidence of deceased voters and look for evidence of voters who voted twice, once in one of the swing states and once in some other state. We had access to all of the data collected by the RNC,

which made my life dramatically easier because it could be very time consuming and difficult to get the data that you need. And I had a pretty much unlimited budget with which to work, which was important as well, because not only did I have to use very expensive data vendors with access to extremely confidential and sensitive information, they had to do that work for me on dramatically expedited timeframe because everything was a crisis. And therefore, everything was super expensive. But we did that work. I started that work within hours after we signed the contract. And then the next day is when the lawyer started sending me claims of fraud that other people had made, which we hadn't considered in the contract language at all. And he basically said, what do

you make of this? That's how it started. And of course, I looked right away at it because I knew how important it was to make sure that there was some merit. And as we worked our way through the first one and I fully described it, gave it the five-star treatment, proved why it was wrong, then it became an everyday multiple times a day occurrence where I was being asked to to vet these claims from others and that's really the story I mean that that I didn't find voter fraud on my own shouldn't be that surprising to anybody but being able to handle so many different claims of fraud from every possible mechanism that you can imagine that's

the really interesting part of what I did and it's so telling about what was happening in our country at that time when you talk about the claims themselves and how they found their way to me. There you go so how many claims do you would you say you processed? I just I talk about I think about 10 in the book and I probably handled 20 or 25 all in. Some of them were completely, utterly, easily proven to be false that I didn't even need an email or anything from Alex. He told me what it was and I said, no, this is probably why. We never heard from it again. The more complicated ones required a lot of back and forth and sometimes required expensive data analytics as well. And part of the nature of my agreement with the campaign was that I got paid in advance for any work that we were going to do. Because of the expensive nature of my vendors, I needed to ensure that we got paid for the work. Everything was cash up, money wired up front. And that's how we conducted the entire engagement.

Plus there's a rumor about getting paid from Trump with lawyers and stuff. Get the money up front. That's what you do. Did you ever run into any sort of situation where the Trump campaign pushed back on your findings and opinion? No, not once. But you also have to remember that I was kept in a very small circle that consisted of two people, myself and Alex Cannon. But I do know that not based on my conversations with Alex, but Alex's testimony to the January 6th committee. So he was subpoenaed by the January 6th committee. And while those hearings were going on,

I had them on in the background. And when I heard his name and saw him appear on TV, that's a great description of his bringing our lack of findings to the attention of people higher up inside the Trump campaign and also at the White House. And in his one minute of video fame during those hearings, he is describing the moment where he delivered to Mark Meadows, who was Trump's chief of staff, the news that the campaign had an expert. This expert looked up and down at the data that was there, 21 million votes worth of data, and that the campaign evaluated every claim of voter fraud that came to the campaign that had at its basis data. And every one of those claims were proven false. And Meadows' response to that was, that means there's no there there, meaning that the claims of voter fraud were empty. He accepted those findings as true. And then the Washington Post

a few months ago reported that Meadows delivered to Trump the news that the campaign not only didn't find evidence of fraud, but had debunked every claim of fraud that was brought to its attention. There you go. Do you think that you might get pulled into the Jack Smith January 6th testimony? I have been pulled in. I've received a subpoena from Jack Smith's investigators about a year ago today, actually. And so that was a national news story when the grand jury leaked. And about a month and a half after I got my subpoena, the Washington Post ran a story about the fact that I had been subpoenaed. I was ready for that one too, because I'd been watching those stories as they leaked. I got subpoenaed by Fannie Willis's investigators in Fulton County, Georgia.

I received a subpoena from Ruby Freeman's legal team. So I guess in some ways you can say I'm now a veteran of receiving subpoenas. Prior to this time a year ago, I had never received one. I've received them by phone. I received them at my front door. I've received them by email and they're not a lot of fun to get. Did you price in the potential for those in your contract? I did not. And if you had asked me if I thought while I was doing this work that any of these subsequent actions would have happened, I would have just laughed at you at the time. When I wrapped up my engagement with the campaign in the first week or two of December 2020,

January 6th was still not on anybody's radar. It was not something I could imagine ever happening in this country. You and me. And especially with the totality of the big nothing that I was able to deliver to the campaign, I really thought ultimately that it was able to deliver to the campaign, I really thought ultimately that it was a done conversation, this whole idea that voter fraud was at the core of Trump's loss. Boy, oh boy, was I wrong about that. And I have a line in the book that I'm really proud of, and I'm going to say it here just because I like the way it sounds so much. At the time,

I had no idea how finding so little could lead to so much. And that so much was, at the risk of repeating myself, was unimaginable at the time I did it as compared to where we are now. And the fact that I'm a fact witness in two of these cases that I brought criminal charges against the former president. And I hope I don't have to, but I might even be called to testify in these cases. Who knows? Yeah, you may have to go down there and do the thing. We appreciate the work you do for the American people and our election integrity. If you do have to go, and you got a book out of it. So there you go. You know, one thing that was interesting about January 6th is we had Peter Strzok on from the FBI on his book. And it was an interesting conversation with him because, you know a lot of people i don't we've

had a few people on the show that have been attacked by donald trump viciously and on twitter and so it's always interesting to ask him you know what does that feel like to be attacked by you know the most powerful man in the world and and somebody wrote on in the comments of the video on youtube they wrote yeah we're gonna fix this all on January 6th. And I never noticed it until after January 6th. And someone brought it to my attention that someone had written that note on the thing. And we were like, holy shit. And like, even Peter was like, wow. I want to get into some of the things you wrote at the end of the book.

My mom read the book and she loved the ending part with suggestions for how to improve. But what made you want to write the book. My mom read the book and she loved the ending part with suggestions for how to improve. But what made you want to write the book? Why was it important for you to get this book out there and tell your story? And of course, the story of what happened with the election. So that's a great question. In the negotiations with my family about doing the work, they really just wanted me to keep this quiet. My in-laws never knew I did the work. I mean, really, it was a very small, very, very small group of people who knew I did the work. When the January 6th committee hearings came up and Alex Cannon was deposed, that's when I realized I needed to start writing the book because I knew the secret wouldn't remain a secret. And I wanted to, first and foremost, tell the story. The story had to be told, but it had to be told correctly.

And it had to be told through my framing, which was also important. I didn't want somebody else's coloring to be brought into the conversation because everything I'm talking about is straight-up facts. They are indisputable, incontrovertible facts. And I need to tell my story without partisan coloring, without taking cheap shots at anybody, because at the end of the day, I need to make sure that everybody can at least be open to receiving the message about what really happened and what the findings were. And most importantly, why so many of the claims of fraud were just plain wrong. So that was the immediate motivation for writing.

And I made that decision and started before I got any of the subpoenas. And then the other thing I realized as I was writing the front part of the book, I realized that I could take some time and try to fill in the middle part of the book, which was data-based, fact-based explanation for why the election turned out the way it did. And I was able to completely nail that. And then the last piece of the book, I realized if I'm going to get 15 minutes, I better make the most of those 15 minutes. And as a designer of complex systems,

somebody who understands elections and everything else, and has been a candidate, that there are many things that we should be doing differently in terms of how we conduct our elections. And I took great care to talk about them, to frame them in nonpartisan ways, and hopefully be able to ignite a national conversation about sensible, nonpartisan, good government-based things that we should be doing to make our elections better.

There you go. We want people to buy the book, so we can't tell them everything, but can you tease out maybe a couple top items for you? Yeah. them everything but can you tease out maybe a couple top items for you yeah the the way our elections work which most of your listeners probably know is that we don't really have federal elections we don't have elections run from washington dc out election the running of elections by per the constitution is handled by the states many states take the handling of the elections and push it down to the counties. So we don't have 50 different election systems.

We have more than 5,000 different election systems. Holy crap. And those systems do things dramatically different from each other, depending on what the thing is. And some of these jurisdictions have excellent data behind them. And some of them have the most God awful data that you can imagine. We're going to get into that because it's an important part of this conversation. But the simplest, most mind blowing question that sort of highlights the differences and why it's important to do something about them is now that we have early voting in many many places

it's now possible for someone to vote three weeks or two weeks before the election and then die before election day and it happens the question is what do you think happens to that vote in that circumstance yeah what do you think i mean they were alive when they voted but i don't know what the legal ease is of you know the yeah the answer is it depends now does it depend on one of the 5 000 yes it depends on which state you live in wow in a third of the states the vote is allowed in another third of the states the vote is disallowed and in the last third of the states, the vote is allowed. In another third of the states, the vote is disallowed. And in the last third of the states, there's no law that considers the situation at all. So whether they count the vote or don't count the vote in a third of those states,

there's no legal foundation for them to do. Right? Now, I'm sure there are going to be some listeners saying, how many votes can that be? In Michigan in 2020, a state that disallows the vote, 3,500 votes were disallowed because the voter cast their vote early and then died before the election. Holy crap. That's not a small number. That's unfortunate. So for me, what's important isn't so much whether the vote is counts or doesn't count i actually don't have a strong position on it other than to say that it's incredibly difficult

to determine through data whether someone's alive or dead so with that difficulty it makes more sense to count the vote than to not count the vote because of the difficulty in figuring out when someone has died. But whether it counts or doesn't count, it should be the same everywhere. How can we have a different outcome for the same situation in different places? And that problem manifests itself over and over and over again. So one of the things that I propose that we need to do, and this makes sense, is that even though the constitution says that the states run the election, the constitution also says that the Congress can pass laws that govern how

elections get done. Now I know that a great many of your listeners right now, and probably you as well, are laughing and going, yeah, Congress can't decide on a lunch order. You know, good luck with that. And that's why having these suggestions come from a nonpartisan place, a common sense place is so important. I go to some lengths to describe the different unfairnesses that arise, the different problems that we have. And I'll give you another example.

And this is another mind blowing example of how things are really unfair with how our elections get done. States provide data on demand to people who ask for it, the voter rolls. So many states provide that data for free. Huge states, Florida, California, Pennsylvania, New York state, it's free or $25 a nominal fee and you can get the data. Would you care to take a guess at the state that charges the most for its data and how much they charge? Florida?

Nope. Florida is $25. California? $25. I don't know. the most for its data and how much they charge florida no florida's 25 bucks california 25 bucks i don't know alabama how much do you think they charge i don't know do you have to go in up the river and in deliverance and do some stuff because they're they're kind of deliverance state right now well i never bought it it was too too expensive. $37,000. $37,000 for Alabama? $37,000, yeah. What is it, like 20 people in that state? Wisconsin's $12,000.

Texas is $7,000 or $8,000. Holy crap. Right? So how do you get Alabama at $37,000 and New York State for free? I don't know. We need some guidelines here congress right i mean this is crazy in massachusetts in maine new hampshire indiana illinois a few others that aren't coming to mind right now you cannot get the voter data wow they won't give it to you

under any circumstances and the worst of the worst is Massachusetts. What happens is Massachusetts has a law that says that the state voter file is not a public document. Wow. Even though federal tax dollars paid for all of that. The Indies made it that way. They didn't want that. Nixon. But the law says that the Secretary of State can choose to give that file to somebody if he so chooses or she so chooses.

So I made the request and the answer came back and said, yeah, no, there's a law that says we don't give it out. But don't worry. You can ask for each municipality's data. You can go to each one and get it. What they didn't tell me but which i knew is that there are 351 municipalities oh my god wow many of them have different computer systems so the data files look different so it's a nightmare of a of a problem and again hello congress right how can we have actual election integrity when we have states that

won't provide their data so anyway you could even be looked at to see what's going on yeah right no transparency whatsoever and so there are many many many examples of this sort of thing that require guidelines congressional guidelines in the form of a law that gets rid of some of these most abusive policies and things that have gone wrong, we have uncompetitive elections. And what I mean by that is in 2024, the presidential race is a foregone conclusion in 45 states. We already know who's going to win those states. The only five that are up in the air are the swing states in congress 80 of the seats are also non-competitive we know which party is going to win those seats just the names change but the party doesn't why are our elections non-competitive because we have elected politicians partisans who get to design the the the maps for the election districts

it's a terrible practice called gerrymandering and it allows these partisans to put their finger on the scale of elections and tip it and it's not illegal but that's as tin pot democracy as you can get. Right. I mean, if you think about democracies in name only, think about Russia and their democracy. Right. Putin wins his elections because he kills his freaking opponents. Right. And that's what's happening with gerrymandering. Your opposition is effectively being killed off because the design of the district guarantees they cannot win. Oh yeah.

It's wrong. It's utterly wrong. And it should be outlawed. But how do you recently rule on some of it? Probably. It is a crap shoot on how they rule and everything else. But the bottom line is California does it right. They have a nonpartisan commission

that designs those districts. You've got to take elected office holders completely off the table. You got to take partisan actors off the table and you have to do it fair. Every election should be a swing election in my opinion of things. If it was, we would have much better governance. We wouldn't have the dysfunction in Congress that we see right now. And honestly, I think the whole political temperature would come down a ton because when you don't have to compromise, you get to swing further out to the extremes. And where we are in this country now is about as far as extremes you can get. With competition, with the need to compromise, the temperature would come down. I think it's the most important thing that we can do in our country is to make our elections competitive. There you go.

And make these politicians have to work harder for their jobs. I mean, all of them. You know, maybe we get rid of the geriatric retirement community up there. Yeah. So many people I know are not happy with the choices they have for president. And a lot of the people in my orbit are never truly happy with the choices that they have. It's a real problem. Yeah, I mean, but most people need to get, I'll put a plug in here.

Most people need to understand that it's steak or chicken. You don't get fish on the menu. And sometimes you have to choose, and really what this country is about is choosing the best baton holder to move this young democracy, this experiment that can be lost any time forward another four years. And you have to choose the best candidate for that. You have to say who can make sure that when we come out the other side, we're still the United States of America and everything that we've done for the last 200, almost 50 years remains the same. Or do we fumble democracy?

Because we're still an experiment and democracies can end. You know, you saw that in Hungary in 2020. I think another country I can't remember in, you know, these things are fragile and we all are stewards of it. Why are elections so important and election and voters' belief in the validity of elections and that their vote counts? As we close out, tell us why that's important or why you think it's important. you have to have a fundamental trust that the pillars of our democracy, the pillar of our democracy, our elections are conducted on the up and up. And there's been a, there was a systematized organized effort that was made to tear down the

public's trust in the integrity of our elections and it was done in a way that was not factual there was no evidence ever submitted that would survive legal scrutiny in court that proved that there was that there were fundamental problems with how our election is run, which is not to say that there aren't things that should be could be fixed. But did those things cause a errant determination that the wrong person won? The answer is no, it's no 61 times over from the failed lawsuits that were filed that we didn't stop. It's no based on the work that I did looking for and then batting away claim after claim after claim after claim it's no based on rudy julie's giuliani's self-admitted lies about ruby freeman and the awful political price he's about to pay not the political price the financial price he

has to pay for his admitted lies about her. It's Carrie Lake in Arizona and her lies and her defamation suit that's underway now for her attacks on election workers there. And across the board, anybody who's making a lot of noise about voter fraud, but doesn't have the evidence to back it up, 2000 Mules is another good example of this. They're not interested in a factual conversation about whether it exists or not they're playing political theater and to play political theater with that as its target and attack on our democracy i believe it's fundamentally wrong definitely and i mean that's how a lot of authoritarian rules i mean russia's technically

kleptocracy i think really but you know a lot of these once i mean russia's technically kleptocracy i think really but you know a lot of these once you can destroy truth once you can destroy reason where people don't believe anything at all you can you can just run rampant with what you do and that's what a lot of these dictators do and people around the world they run these illicit governments with fake voting and and so this is the beginning of the end of their democracy if we're not careful and we don't have you know documents like yours that say hey you know this this this these misnomers or lies weren't true and you know we did the research you know when you talk to people you see people being interviewed and you're like do you are you aware of all the lawsuits that took place and all the judges that you know people that investigate this have spent millions of dollars and there's no there there you know and it's not unreasonable

to look at the motivation of of one person and go you know they they really have some disabling personality structures and losing is not one of them that they that they do well with, especially under narcissism. So look, I've run twice. I've lost twice. I lost a very close race my second time. It sucks to lose. I get it, right? I mean, if you haven't done it, you can't appreciate how difficult the endeavor is, how intensely personal it is, and the price that it exacts on you and your family

while you're doing it, it really is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life times two. And so I get the unwillingness to make nice after the whole thing is done especially if it's a nasty race i get it but it's one thing to think bad thoughts it's another thing to act out on them and you know it's it's we have to get back to a more gentlemanly and gentle womanly way of conducting our elections and ending difficult races you know one thing that we didn't touch on that I do want to touch on briefly is, and this is an important, important part of the book, and that is why did Trump actually lose? And I didn't have access to the information needed in November of 2020 to be able to do this. In fact, even if it was there, I didn't have the time. But in early 2023, I did have the time and the data was available. And I was able to do a

comparison of results on a county by county basis of the percent of the vote Trump took in 2020 versus the percent of the vote that Trump took in 2016. And when you stack up, looking at the overall results nationally, looking at the state-based results, and then looking at the counties in the swing states, what's fascinating is that there's a nationwide trend where Trump, on average, did about two and a half percent less well in 2020 than he did in 2016 across every possible different way to slice it up. National, state based or county based. And when you look at the red counties, let's say in Georgia. These are counties that voted for Trump in 2016 and also voted for Trump in 2020. But in 2020, across Georgia, on average, Trump did two and a half percent less well in those red counties than he did in 2016. The number

of votes that Trump lost by in Georgia 2020 cost Trump 100,000 votes. Yeah. And that's in the red states. In the red counties in the red states, that's not fraud. You know what that is? That's the rhinos. Yeah. The rhinos that he told to get lost, pound sand. I don't want you. They listen to him.

And you don't have to take my word for that. Trump's pollster. The guy he's paid tens of millions of dollars to. Across two different presidential campaigns. In December of 2020. Published exit polling. Privately to the campaign. But it leaked.

And he documents exactly what I just told you. Wow. And Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger, in his look at what happened after the 2020 election, this is wild. There were 27,000 Republican primary voters in 2020 who didn't vote in the presidential election. Wow. Rhinos. in 2020 who didn't vote in the presidential election Wow Rhinos there's another there's another 30,000 voters in 2020 in Georgia who voted for down ticket Republicans but cast no vote for president so they showed up to vote but they didn't Wow I mean and what's crazy about where we're at right now is what that

shows us is that mega by itself is not enough to win a national election especially in the swing states but trump is doing nothing to bring the rhinos back into into the fold in fact he continues to attack them yeah so you kind of saw them voting for nicki haley in the primary that's right you sure did so 30 you know there's a there's a problem that the trump campaign faces that they're not addressing and that problem is broadening his base of support he's he's got the mega vote locked which is great for primaries, but not enough for generals. Unless he figures out how to identify and bring over new support, and you would think that the moderate Republicans would be the most natural group of voters to bring back

into the fold, he's not even trying. You know, as a candidate myself, I just don't understand how somebody could be so concerned about a couple thousand, you know, imaginarily fraudulent votes and not care about millions of votes of rhinos across the country. I can't square those two things off and it's going to be a big challenge for the Trump campaign if they don't figure out how to bring the rhinos back. I think it definitely will. I'm glad you had that data because I've often wondered if, you know, there was more people moving, there's more people moving into the South from democratic states like New York and California. I mean, I think that, and I've often wondered if the political makeup of that movement moving into Texas, Florida, Georgia,

and stuff had that effect. But from what you're telling me, it was those rhinos. And yeah, there's, you know, I'm not a fan in any way, shape or form of Donald Trump. I've been following since 86. The, so I know a lot about him. He, it was said at one time that he, he had the potential to be a great president if he would have only, you know, moved to the middle or, or embraced the middle and not been so far, so far extreme toxic. And he could have been a great president and won that second election.

And so that's interesting that the data shows that. Yeah, it's crystal clear. Yeah. It really is. Now, when you look at it, I think a lot of independents have been alienated, especially why, you know, I mean, some of the toxicity we're seeing where he said, I don't know what he said recently, but he said several things recently. You can't keep up with it, but it's really toxifying and you're just like, holy crap. And then you saw the Nikki Haley and I've been hearing some of the exit polls from Nikki Haley are that they're not, they're either not going to vote.

They're going to do the, you know, don't fill in that blank or not show up. And then most of the people that come out in the primary anyway, right. Or the hardcore Republicans or the hardcore. Well, it happens that way in democratic politics too, right? I mean, the primary system itself is pretty broken. Only about 20% of the pop of the voting population votes in primaries. And those who do bother to turn out are usually the most partisan. So we're getting delivered as general election candidates, candidates who win the primaries, who are not necessarily representative of the best candidates for a general election appeal to voters in the middle. And voters in the middle don't want in the middle don't want revolution. They don't want toxicity. They don't want dysfunction in Congress. They want the trains

to run on time. And we don't get all that many candidates anymore who are about that. And I think that we're poorer off for that. Definitely, definitely. And I like your suggestions in the book. My understanding from reading the Federalist Papers is Madison and the other ones that definitely definitely and i like your suggestions in the book you know i my understanding from reading them the federalist papers is madison and the other ones the reason they made it so the federal government didn't control elections so they couldn't be seized and in it it may have been a whole different outcome if it if it if it had been run at the federal election level do you think yeah i mean i'm not i'm not opposed to states continuing to run elections i just need to see them doing so more consistently yeah and not having as many

dramatic differences in how they do things yeah and good data i mean it's 2024 like come on good data ken it's been wonderful to have you on i think the most thing the important thing that americans need to realize is we've been selling, you know, this great democracy for so many years and being able to pass that baton without issues to the next person being, being, having the successors, you know, that's something we've bragged about to countries around the world. And, and we just got laughed at by Putin and China and everybody else who's like, ah, see, you guys are as crazy as we are. And it's such an important aspect of our democracy

and such a foundational thing that we pass that baton without violence, without all these crazy claims. So hopefully we can get to better things. But I don't know. It's going to be a weird world with AI and different things. But thank you very much for coming on the show, Ken. We really appreciate it. Thank you.

The name of the book is Disproven and the website is disproven.com. There you go. Disproven.com. Order of the books, folks. It's available March 12th, 2024. 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. Please pass around, get everybody to read this book so they can get the facts, damn it.

Read and educate yourself. That's what the Chris Foss Show is about. Thank you very much, Ken, for being on the show. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, 4ChatsChrisFoss, LinkedIn.com, 4ChatsChrisFoss, and all those crazy places around the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.