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tv   Washington Journal Ken Block  CSPAN  March 15, 2024 1:06am-2:02am EDT

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>> we want to welcome to our table this morning ken block, she's the author of this book, this proven by unbiasedea campaign. his name may found similar. mr. block why did the former president campaign hire you and what did they hire you to do? >> yeah, it was sort of a two-part project. the original request was for me to look for evidence of voter fraud in the swing states in the 2020 election. i was lookingta for evidence of
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deceased voters and for voters who voted twice once in a swing state and once in some o state. very quickly, a matter of just a day or two after my contract was signed the campaign attorneys who were doing their due evaluating claims t of voter frd that were coming into the campaign from everywhere, from all over the country, from amateurs looking at data to lawyers whose names we all recognize making claims of fraud and when those claims involved data the campaign asked me to evaluate them and tell them if they were correct or not and in every circumstance they were false. >> you wri i book, the contract was signed on november 5th, 2020. i had no idea then how finding so little would lead to so much. you signed a contract with the trump campaign on that november 5th, 2020, how long did you work for them?
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>> 35 days, 35 of what is honestly one of the had. d >> 35 days. >> yeah. >> in 35 days did you have access to all the data that you needed access to to -- to determine whether or not there was fraud? >> so it's very nuanced answer that i'm going give you. the answer is i had access t das available at that time. so i had full access to the data that the rnc had available, what's very interesting about voter data is that no state makes available to anybody who voted in persons, inside that 30-35 day window. you get all of the mail-in ballot information that you can process but for some reason the in-person votes are not there. that's a large chunk of the vote that wasn't available however all of that information is made available usually by january or february after the election and just because that data wasn't
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available to me at that period of time because nobody has gone through it since and determined, wow, there was actually a bunch of fraud, that is not an impactful meaningful problem that i had when i was working in november of 2020. >> well, then explain how you could go back to the trump campaign and say there is no voter fraud in those 35 days? >> well, so i didn't say there was no voter fraud. i told them there wn' matter ans an important distinction. we did find some dead voters, we did find duplicate voters but the numbers were very far less than the thousands, many thousands that were necessary inside the swing states and i we discussed the challenges with having access to some data, not having access to other data, i can pretty confident i will sayi reported to specifically alexi cannon who was my main contact
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had a lot of confidence in the fact that i was being as the thorough as i was and probably numbing his brain with how much information i was educating him about data and the processes that i was going cethrough. i know hee trusted my results ad he communicated thoroughly to mark meadows but evaluating everyone else's claims of fraud and we found nothing that rose to the leverage of changing an election result that would survival legal scrutiny in court. >> did you gon back after those 35 days and do a more thorough look at the data after more became available? >> i didn't personally go back and take a at it. some of the data is -- all of the data is available at that point now and for all of the vested interest in looking for sure there were manyon eyes that
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looked at this data after the fact and nobody has gone through the data and made any determination that contradicts what i had done within the 30 days. the other thing that's important to remember here to file a claim in court you can't file a claim based on data that doesn't exist. what's only work with out there right now and right now it was mail ballots and there were plenty look at, tens of millions of them and having gone through all of those, there was -- o look, my job was toit e voter fraud i wanted to be the guy to do it, right. it's a pretty extraordinary thing if you were able to find someone like that and i wasn't h going to ruin my professional reputation with results that i would be humiliate■m■ d in cour. in the contract i put a sentence in there that i'm going to deliver findings that would stand up in court and unfortunately there was nothing that rose to that. >> who hired you,, alex con non, i don't know why.
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>> still to this day we didn't have time to talk about that stuff. >> what is a data special snies. >> what is a data special mist i own software engineering company. we specify in large database applications. i participated ingi an architect in the country's first online debit card system for food stamps for the state of texas,bi we do a lot of work in the gaming industry so there's lots of transactions that's where we do a lotf data mining for waste and fraud is something that i enjoyed doing and we looked at food stamp fraud and medicare fraud, that sort of
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thing. as we set up t going to do this, he told me that he was going keep my identity and my company's identity didn't want e knowing who was doing the work. he wanted us to be shielded from people insisted on results because that's not what works for court with a successful really alex from anyone within the campaign. >> so when you spoke to alex cannon, where did that communication go from alex once you spoke to him, who did he talk to? >> so at the time i had no idea but with the january 6th■] transcripts i learned that obviously he was talking to other upper-level campaign attorneys and then most notably the fact that he delivered the tanews to mark meadows that the campaign was unable to find
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fraud that would matter. >> and that information went to the former president, correct? >> after everything there were news reports that mark meadows took the information to thehe ol office. >> who did you not talk to? >> really just about everybody else. alex cannon was my -- eaid helle in the morning i was talking to. >> what about the lawsuits brought by rudy giuliani and others? >> yeah, i saw claims that i can confidently same through sidney powell. she was helping to push a mathematical theory they were trying to apply the state of pennsylvania to prove voterer fraud and that was wrong. it was about 16, so this is a
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pattern. all the numbers were hyperinflated because the people who did the analysis didn't understand what they were looking at andth they didn't understand how to make sure they weren't making errors and identifying un consistently acre board there was a lack of understanding of what people were looking at and that's why most of the claims were false. ook, ken block is the author, disproven, unbias search for voter fraud for the trump campaign, the data that shows how he lost and how we can improve our elections. it's your turn to ask your questions, give us your comments about what you've heard about voter fraud and have ken block respond. he's our guest here this morning. before we get to calls, though, which states did you focus on this book? >> it's swing state. geor nevada, wisconsin, michigan, pennsylvania. >> all right, let's go, joseph in point pleasant beach, good
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morning to you. >> good morning, how are you? yeah, how are you doing, ken, i've seen you before on tv. i have a couple of points to make. the first point is there's nothing that say that about the 7 states that you're talking about. they changed their laws unconstitutionally only the state can do that. you can't tell me that's not right. i don't care how many degrees you have. the second giuliani had affidavit from poll workers that saw fraud and the government -- and the judges didn't take them up andnd said standing. you keep counting same illegal votes you will get the same number. they were questioning the validity of the votes. i don't care how many degrees you have, that's what happened. >> joseph, please hang on the line and listen to the response. >> yeah, this is a really important point. so my work was all tasked specifically to creating
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findings of fraud that would survive legal scrutiny. that means when you bring it to court and the defense attorneys are going to come at you with everything they have to try to show that you messed up, that you were wrong, it's a very high bar and a lot of what you're talking about isn't data evidence especially about the giuliani thing. it's hearsay evidence and hearsaev evidence that you can bring to court successfully and especially when you want to overturn an election result. it has to be a very different kind of evidence. as f laws and everything, there had been court cases where that was not determined to be aroblem. so i get it and i understand that it's upsetting and that the results, many, many people wanted the results to be different. my role in all of this was very narrow and very specific to deliver to the campaign if it existed evidence that would work
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that could overturn the election and it simply wasn't there. >> gordon, in wyoming, good morning, gordon, go ahead. >> good morning. washington journal just has to be required viewing for all three branches of government.hey have to swear to watch washington journal every yway, i'm 78 year's old. trump and biden, they need to step aside. i'd like to see vice president harris go against liz cheney. younger people, please, please also off the subject instead of building a pier in gaza -- >> gordon, gordon, can you please stick to the topic here this morning. do you have a question or comment about ken block's book?
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>> well, i'm sure that -- that trump lost the election for goodness sakes but that's all i've got. lst -- >> gordon, we will leave it there and move onto randy that's in zeth west virginia, hi, randy. >> hey, how are you doing? how many democrats voted fraudulently and how many blicans voted fraudulently, that's my question? >> okay, we will take that. >> that's a great question and so i'm going to expand a little bit because we found a couple a hundred fraudulent votes. we found deceased votes scattered around swing state in 2020, a couple oficate votes whe votes was cast in swing state, if i expanded a little bit and found information i found in 2016 where w identified across 24 states, i want to be clear how much data we looked at. we found about 8,000 confirmed
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duplicates votes acrs all of those states with most number of votes in florida just over 2,000. not enough to change any result here and when we look at registrations of the party of the registrants involved in this. it is 50-50, it's not all republicans. where people aree voting twice it's usually crime of privilege, someone who owns two homes in two different places figureseren exercising twice and highly illegal. hopefully eliminate as we go along. >> explainly highly illegal? >> felony wi u five years in jail and $10,000 fine. >> debra in westchester, ohio,
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republic.taking my call. my concern is not who much who wanted but undermining the integrity of the electio introducing a mass mail ballot without process validation. now i spent my career as a scientist in process validation mostly over the counter drugs and we should have, we should have separated the mail ballots. it was clearly outside of the state's constitutional guidelines, some of the states and that's amicus brief that was written was not taken by the supreme court but that's another issue, but in county alone there was 113,000 ballots in pennsylvania that were not accur the addresses. there were all kinds of other things, so we should have taken the mass mail ballots and said,
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hey, it's outside, the system won't be robust and, therefore, we are going count them separately and you to have a copy of your id attached at the time that we receive the ballot we will separate the ib, attach it to the envelope and then we can do an audit and do it separately but thi last election was not a robust validation of an election which ht. can consider with all >> that's my concern. >> debra hang in the line and listen to the response. >> yeah. what i'm going to tell you i think you're right when it comes to the weak validation that we currently have in place for mail ballots in many places in the country but not necessarily all. when you talk about election integrity one of the challenges we have is every state does it differently and many times, mant counties within the same state do the same thi■3■ reay from ead that's inconsistency and integrity are two different words and they mean opposite
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things in my world. and i have a lot of suggestions in the book for things that we can and should do to improve our elections and i know that there are many congressmen and women who watch this right now and i'm asking you, begging you to please consider a nonpartisan effort to reallyva operate our elections and make some really necessary changes to eliminate some of the problems that we have right now and i don' demonize mail-in ballots but using signatures to validate to say who you are casting anonymously i think that's a real challenge and century-old technology, question do far better than what we are doing right now and i have many, many suggestions along those lines. so i agree with you caller we really need to do better than we are doing right now. >> you look at pennsylvania and the claim of dead voters, what did you find? >> so i think i've done something fairly unique in the country. i predicted a couple dead
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votes in pennsylvania before they occurred. and what's interesting about this in particular is there was -- i was involved in at all of the registered voters in pennsylvania to see who was deceased. i found a couple who had died years before september 2020 when they had brand-new registrations on the system and looked at those and i said, you watch, these will be fraud. that warning made its way into a lawsuit that was working its way through pennsylvania's courts at the time and sure enough on election day some of those ñ■ votes, the votes count bud then after the factco the person who created ad ■ each of the votes they arrested the people who made those fraudulent votes and they prosecuted and got convictions for thosee fraudulent votes and what's interesting in the case of pennsylvania, the two casesre i'm talking about were both
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republicans who cast deceased votes on family members. >> do we know who they voted for? >> yes n both cases and this is an important question, i'm going g answer to it, yes, because the person who committed the fraud admitted that they were republicans and that they had cast the fraudulent votes on behalf -- for president trump but what's really important about this whole concept of contesting an electionim based n identifying fraudulent that what i hope most of your viewers understand is when you cast a vote who you vote for is not disclosed. tie your particular ballot back to you once you've cast your vote. so let's imagine, this didn't happen but let's imagine that i found 15,000 fraudulent votes in georgia. v okay. had i found those votes i'm of law would have looked at those and made a determinationad that therefore the election should have been overturnve becaus
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and document would be that those fraudulent votes worked against president trump's interests. those votes can't be shown to harm the campaign because you don't know who those votes were cast for. it's a really important point all of these issues that revolve around fraud without being able to show harm in that those to trump's opponent, you're not going to get an election overturned. >> so sticking with pennsylvania and the claims by some trump lawyers that there were dead voters there, you found what? >> oh, i think we probably found -- i can't tell you, ten, on the high end. and i don't think a lot of them were prosecuted. i think there were only a handful that i' aware of, two or three that resulted in convictions. i don't know whatever happened to the rest of them. the trump campaign for the fraud
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i did find as best as i know they didn't forward those results to law enforcement. >> go to dan next, south■f dako. >> hello. hi, dan, your turn. >> yeah,stion is so trump lost the popular vote by like what 8 million and he lost electoral college by 50 we have to go back to gore versus george w. bush and so like what you're saying in your book is that, you know, you try to uncover the fraud and that it didn't come out where it would affect the election and we also got to go back in the time frame that was during covid and so there was a lot more mail-in ballots at that time and i think this election coming up in 2024 will be like a lot less, you know, mail-in ballots and more
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had a guy from mississippi come in to our work here in south dakota and said, you know, you're going to make sure that these elections are valid a i said where i go vote in my little elementary school here in sioux falls, south dakota, you have to have your id,■ double tn you go in and vote, okay, so there is no voter fraud republicans, okay, my question to your guest is why won't trump and the republicans accept the fact that they lost because al gore had to do it when george w. bush vote and i think he got screwed in that election. why don't you think -- yeah, why don't you think trump w't accept this? >> yeah, it's a good gee. questionwhatsoever. there's probably political answer to it. my role and that everything is happening here is focused on the data and i'm not going to dive into the political piece of it. i've run
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for governor twice in my state of rhode island. i lost a statewide primary by 3,000 votes and it hurt to concede that race. i didn't want to concede that race. it was an ugly race. it was intensely personal but i did.as and, you know, that's what our democracy looks like and i hope as we move forward out of 2020 that we can get our elections back to a more civil and responsible way of conducting our ourselves and dealing with the impact of losing. >> are you a republican or■á@cr? >> i'm currently a registered republican. >> did you run as a republican? >> in my two runs, my first run i started a centrist political party in rhode island in 2009 and after needing to challenge the state's ballot access laws and federal court getting them to clear unconstitutional launching the party we needed somebody to run for governor who got at least 5% of the votes that ended up being me and i ani
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realize i was pretty good at -- at the campaigning and i had a lot of ideas i wanted to implement and i also realized in the couple of years between 2010 and 2014 that working via third party just wasn't going too work. too hard to get traction. people can't put their heads around what it means to be anytng other than democrat or republican and in rhode island, i mean, a reformer, i like to see change, rhode island is a heavily democrat state and -- you can't affect change within the democratic machinery. you to operate outside of the machinery and that's why i'm a republican. d look at the counties and how the former president won small counties across thewhat td you? >> that's a great question. that's crucially important for everybody to understand because this gets right to the point of
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helping to inform everybody why trump lost and when you look at just the swing states but this existed across the country whether it was a ret state or a blue state, a red county or a blue county and what i mean by red or blue in this case is that trump won them in both 2016 and 2020, that's red in my opinion. if the testimony contract won in 2016 and 2020, that's blue. and when you look, divide things up that way what you end up wit is across the board trump in terms of his share of the vote in 2020 relative to 2016 he less well across the board and even the reddest of red states and in the reddest of red counties on average he did 2 and in 2020 than he did in 2016, the voterot fraud. how could it be in theed state
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that you see this particular thing happen, that's not voter fraud and i'm going to tell right now -- going to tell you what it actually is. trump has made no secret, he has no love for centrist republicans, rinos■u as you call them and basically told them to get lost and he did. that's what where the 2 and a half percent is and don't just take my word for it, trump's pollster, tony authored a private document for the campaign with exit polling in 2020 in the swing states. they interviewed 30,000 people leaving the polling place. he documented this exact same problem that he was losg those republicans he was losing were the ones in the middle and then the other piece of this that's also really important, giving you a third confirmation about this in the forward to my book, secretary of state in georgia, i identified and remember the margin of victory call it 12,000 votes in georgia, they
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identified almost 30,000 republican primary voters the py but did not vote in the general election. that's 2 to 3 t times trump's margin of loss, another 30,000 votes in georgia were cast in 2020 by voters who voted for down-ticket ■crepublicans, congressional ras and other races down low butns left presidential pick blank or they voted worst case they acal and, again, this is loss of moderate republican support. it remains a problem today that i think messaging is not opening up the ability for moderate republicans to come back into the fold at this point and i wonder if he can change his messaging because without that support i don't think maga all by itself is enough to win a nation e situation. >> are you saying theio
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president's pollster knew the outcome based on the exit polling thatid they were doing befo called? >> i don't think -- i think that he could certainly read the tealeaves which is different knowing with certaintyon resultg against trump. what was really -- what's really important with the exit poll, though, he identifies the loss of support and it's such a dramatic consistent loss of support nationwide which think that his pollster could determine at that point in time. i was able to determine it looking at data in early 2023. i think the reason polls missed this is -- and we saw this in 2016, we now know it's the samer in 2020 polling typically talks to likely voters but in 2016 trump wonot that election becaue
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of unlikely voters. in 2020, what trump's pollster identified was that one in six of theot of the 30,000 that he spoke with were first-time voters and they were coming to the polls to vote against president trump. >> des moines, democratic caller. >> hello, thank you, ken, thank you for pointing out the crook is still here, but the worst part gossip is king. >> okay, brad, we are listening to you, you have to listen to us through your phone. mute your television. >> yes, ma'am. >> and we will take your question or your comment. >> my comment is thank you, god bless you, kennethnd hope you do well because the crook is still a crook no matter what they put on him. >> mr. block, why are you writing this book, how are you able to write this book?
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>> that's a great question. as we were negotiating my contract, alex and i, i asked alex flat out and said, i will sign an nda, nondisclosure agreement and everybody was under fire at that point in time and what i mean by that alex were 2 or 3 days post election, o alex's life was crazy, the whe campaign apparatus was spinning up and effort to try to figure out if they can make a legal case about voter fraud, what many people don't understand an what i find incredible about all of this talk about voter fraud is that if you don't find it and successfully contest it inside about 30 days after the election there is no legal mechanism after the votes are certified to be successful with a lawsuit challenging the -- the legality of the election. you can't ort certified. so that's why those 30 days were
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soe crucial. that's why so much effort was put in all lawsuits that were filed after the certification were destined to lose. >> carol from new york writes in to say if the in-person data wasn't available, how do you know that people didn't vote twice in person and by mail? >> sure, and i just -- to finish my thought, you asked me the question why and when i offered alex to sign the nda he said don't bother and that's how i'm speaking to you here today about it. >> yes. >> i addressed the question the caller earlier, caller earlier, but what's important here is the work i did was trying to find successful arguments in that moment to take to court to matter and to impact the election result. because the in-person data was
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not available at that time you can't go to court with data that's not available. more iortaly a claim of voter fraud about data that you don't have access to and in this circumstance, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim of voter fraud not on the people whose job it is to disprove voter fraud. so it's really important point. >> on chapter 19 can trump'sst claim of massive mail-ballot fraud can be -- disproved? >> , no it cannot. congress needs to step in and help bring regulation on how we handle mail ballots in the country and i can't sit here and tell you accurately that i can describe how mail ballots work everywhere because it'sve different everywhere in which we talk about it. not only is it different in terms of process, the death that states collect regarding mail
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ballots and how they're used it's all over the map. it's very difficult to put your head and your hand on what's working well. because of the inability to collect meaningful data about how mail ballots were actually the count troy process every mail ballot cast in the 2020 election requires looking at more than 500 different files of mail ballots from across the states don't run their elections on a state base. i live in one that does.i live n the country. states like new york and other large, large states, in fact, most states run elections on the counties and what a lot of the viewers may not understand there's more than 5,000 different election jurisdictions in the country whi their elections largely as they
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deem fit using systems that they implement. there's not a lot of central control about how counties do things and you end up with some really crazy problems because of this lack of continuity to tans question - could i prove that mail ballots weren't a problem, nobody can, but much more importantly nobody can prove they were and that's the burden of proof problem here. to go to court with a bunch of questions about how and their legitimate questions about how mail ballots work is not a successful argument in the court of law. >> andauderdale, florida, democratic caller. >> yes, i like to thank you for taking my call. >> you bet, we are listening toi you, go ahead. >> yes. i have a question for ken bck tell him.ld >> okay, go for it.
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>> i respect you very much for having the guts even though itd, you had the guts to say that it was a fair election. i lost, but i have great admiration for ken block and i'd like to know where i can buy ken block's book. >> well, pretty much anywhere you can buy a book. it's certainly online at amazon, barnes & noble, can buy books it is available and thank you for all of that, i really appreciate it. >> were you paid by the trump campaign for the work you did? >> i was. i was very highly compensated for the work that we did inside those 30 days. it was just north of 3 quarters of a million dollars. a lot of that money was only temporarily in my company's bank accounts because we had to pay outside vendors to do some ofo> the very sensitive data work necessary to confirm individual
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identities so when you're working with voter data tout if, deceased, passed away, there's gentler ways to say apologize, to determine when someone is deceased you need more than just a name and birth date. this is a problem across all to have analysis that i had done and that were brought to me by others. people were looking at names and dates of birth and ty saw john smith born on january 4th, 1972 in two different states they assumed it's the same person but 90% of the times it's not the same person. a country of more than 300 million people. many share exact same name and it's not impossible. it's very likely with two different people with the same information that that they're different people. so i have to go use venders who have access to highly sensitive
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data like social security numbers and other things like that to try to confirm the we can know with certainty whether they are deceased or not and know with certainty if we have mahed two different people potentially duplicate vote if they are the same people or different people. >> did noncitizens vote in arizona? >> an interesting claim there. 1500 names were delivered to me and names and addresses and dates of■2■f birth. the question was are these illegals or not and that's an impossible question to answer for anybody and the reason is because there is where you can s up and be able to say, citizen
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or noncitizen. there's only one database that i'm familiar with that might have an ability to answer that question and that's at the department of homeland security but by federal law that database cann b used for this purpose. so we took a shot at it even though i gave every caveat and in many to alex beforethis anal. i said, you know, we can do our best but if we don't find socials for these people, social security numbers that doesn't mean they are not citizen. when we ran the list most of the individual that is we couldn't find social security numbers for were young. so it's a wholly -- you can't prove it, you can't disprove it but the trend which is important when you're dealing with something like this is that for those individuals we couldn't find social security numbers for, they were all turned age of 30, they are likely legitimate
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citizens they just don't show up in credit bureaus. >> here is another viewer text us ron. drop boxes and mail-in ballots, how secure, we should do what france does with mail-in ballots? tell us how secure drop boxes are? >> the real problem with drop boxes isn't the security of the ballots once they are in there, it's really more about whose putting them in and how many and i think drop boxes comes to the question of ballot and i want to talk about btg.ut i have firsthand experience because of rhode island. be lost harvesting is legal and well understood if you don't in ballot harvesting, it's veryho difficult to win your election. i hired in 2014 a guy that calls himself the mail ballot king. eddy, if you're watching, hello.
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they go out, they go nursing homes and other places and they literally help individuals cast their ballot and deliver ballots to election workers whether it's a drop box or other type of thing. i think ballot harvesting is a terrible practice because it's why are we electing somebody on the basis of which campaign can most effectively collect and deliver ballots. that's not a great indicator of the capabilities of a candidate. t outlaws ballot harvesting. is one of my reforms i think we need to have because it is a terrible way to elect anybody, whether it is a mayor where the president. -- or the president. host: we will go to robbie. republican.
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caller: first time caller. i was going to hit the thing about georgia, they did not do signature verification. i am a huge trump supporter. was shocked. there is video of -- video showing fraud. >> so my next thing i wanted to ask you, 330 million people in me a number how many 18 andgive older could have voted and did vote and get to 81 million for biden, around 74, 75 million for trump. how do you -- those are high numbers? how do you get to that? and i will listen for your answer because that was my main about georgia thing. >> se. video and all the cheating that went on, ballot harvesting.
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throwing ballots i office. i saw the video that showed on tv and people that testified. >> did you listen about ken block's answer who voted in georgia and who did not, the numbers? >> maybe i got bits and pieces of that. >> let's have him repeat that. >> there's a real basic simple answer to the georgia results anwhy president trump lost and it's because president trump's message excluded moderate republicans. president trump told moderate republicans to get out and they did and you a lot of loss of support in georgia, you needed 12,000 more votes than were gotten, that was readily explained. president trump in the reddest counties in georgia lost more than a hundred thousand votes
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because of his underperfor■@mane in 2020 relative to 2016. think about that. 100,000 votes in the reddest counties in the state. that's why he lost. all of the other focus on trying to conjure up other reason that is could havera loss ignores the most obvious explanation that's out there and in my line of work you keep it simple and when there's such an obvious answer it's usually almost always the right one. >> his comment about the overall numbers of people who voted in this country. >> roughly 330 million people. if you, of course, as you get older you start to see people die and so you can't really -- i'm going to estimate here. if you figure that if you call anybody you u of 20 and over the age of 20, you basically find out that a
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quarter of the country would qualify as young. in 330 million people you're talking about maybe 70 to 80 million people under the age everybody else is over the age of 20. so you're talking about more than 200 million adults in the country. much more than 200 million adults in the country. so it's impossible that 150, 160 million votes were cast in this election, based on our demographics and who is old enough to vote, absolutely, it's totally legitimate and nowhere near age qualified to cast votes. >> ed in colombia station, ohio, republican. >> yeah, good morning. i think the two biggest -- even all that's wrong. severe penalties and so much
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time to prove -- dump over a hundred million that was illegal, 2 or 3 months before the last presidential election, five, six states that were key states and it was -- they overloaded them, one in so many miles apart. that was i legal. >> can we talk about that, ken block? >> yeah, i don't know the specifics of what those dollars were spent on. what i do know is that in our election since united the ability for outsiders to purpose money into elections is pretty much a wide open thing at this
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point. so i would prefer to see less money -- outside money in politics than what we have right now just in general because money is such a powerful factor in determining who wins an election especially when you tv studio anymore and know that you will be talking to a majority of voters. your message has to be scattered,ensive and those who have the money are going to have a substantial advantage. i would love to see outside influence dollars reduced so that candidates can be more on an each playing field which i know is just naive and everything else but, again, if you want to determine on the merits who is the better candidate, it shouldn't be who has more money.sh >> you encourage people too follow the money when it comes to these lawsuits as well. the lawsuits claiming voter
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fraud incp020. talk about sidney powell, the other lawyers, the people involved in the -- the nonprofit that is they have set up to co >> yeah, so there is an industry, there's a voter fraud industry that has risen even before the 2020 election and certainly since sidney powell is the poster child for this. she's a lawyer, she was the author of a pair of really awful lawsuits called the crack that she even admitted that nobody should have really taken all that seriously but she filed them which is a real problem for a lawyer to put lawsuit out into the court systems and she has paid not a monetary price for it but she has paid a professionale price for having done that. monetarily, she has made a lot of money, well north of $16 million because of the work she's done in bringing
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forward these lawsuits on behalf of president trump that based on her own admission have no real validity to them and there are others as well a my favorite is a data guy whose name is matt brainer whose bad analytics showed up in georgia, they were everywhere and he made the basic mistake looking at year of birth and name saying that's the same person indiffera georgia state legislator in a hearing challenged him and she took some oflaim matches voters in georgia claiming it was the same person in arizona and they simply reached out and contacted the people at addresses, they were two different people who happened t share the same name and same year of birth. braynir raised more than half a
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million dollars. he came onto my twitter feed and basically raise money and my response to him was, the video where your data was absolutely torn apart and never heard from him again. so even today there's still an effort to monetize bad analytics in the hunt for voter fraud. i just caution everybody to be reful because there's very few people doing the work seriously. >> we have a minute left with you, you write in chapter 2 t master lever, single voting. >> 50 years reform advocates tried to eliminate single party voting from rhode island, the mechanism you go in and vote republican andemra and walk out. on the merits it's a terrible way to do it. rhode island being heavily controlled by democrats have no interest in changing that.
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i got involved. we got social media involved. the newspaper really got involved and hundreds of people in the state house and over the course of eight years broke down the legislature, the legislative willingness to continue the fight and we finally got remove which had was a huge fight and it shouldn't be that hard to get political change. please congress let's not make it so hard to make reform. >> finally, have you looked at the data of the primary season and any -- anything that sticks out to you? >> i have not had a chance to look at any data. i've been a little busy. >> where do you -- you -- where should people go to look at data? >> that's a challenge, you can es but not all states. some of the states will give you their data for free. alabama charges $37,000 for their data.
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look at it and if you go the massachusetts secretary of state what they'll tell you we can't give you the state data but you can go to every city and town and ask for it and there's 351 cities and towns in massachusetts. this is another area where we need congressional oversight to put boundaries on transparency and the availability of data to the public. >> so for our viewers you can get the book disproven and look at the claims that ken block investigated hired by the trump campaign to do so in 2020 and his recommendations for changes going forward. ken block, appreciate the conversation. >> thank you. >> coming up friday morning dan with the national committee to preserve social security and medicare talks about the future of the program in light of recent statements by president
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biden and former president trump. then we will look at the current legal issues facing the former president as he runs for another term with mike davis, founder a3 project. c-span's washington journal join the conversation live 7:00 eastern on c-span, c-span >> view of society of which we
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live today and his solutions for the ills of our time. >> saturdays at 7:00 p.m. eastern american history tv will aireries free to choose featuring nobel prize milton friedman. first aired on public television in 1980. the friedman wrote a book with the same name. the friedman's advocate free market principles and limited government and other topics include welfare, education, equality, consumer and worker protection and inflation. watch free to choose saturdays 70 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span2. ■tee hearr
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