ST. LOUIS, Missouri — The two Republicans running to hold Missouri's top legal office both recently repeated false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
The Republican data expert hired by the Trump campaign to find evidence of voter fraud says they're wrong.
"We were very far away from proving in any of the swing states that enough fraud -- that was detectable and provable -- that enough fraud was there to have come close to meeting the margin of victory in any of those states," Ken Block said.
Appearing on The Record to discuss his new book "Disproven," Block described some of the work he performed for the Trump campaign in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
"We looked exhaustively," he said. "The Trump campaign lawyers who hired me to do this work absolutely accepted my findings, which said that we didn't come close. We did find some dead voters. In some states, we did find some people who voted twice in two different states, but nowhere near the quantities that were necessary."
Incumbent Andrew Bailey, who was appointed to the post by Gov. Mike Parson, and his primary challenger Will Scharf, who is currently defending Trump in his criminal trials, both appeared on stage at a public forum in Springfield, Missouri, alongside Democratic candidate Elad Gross earlier this month.
Toward the end of their hourlong discussion, the moderator asked each candidate if they believed the 2020 election was stolen.
"Yeah, absolutely. It was absolutely stolen," Bailey said. "The left stole that election by changing the rules of game at the 11th hour. They're going to try to steal this one by silencing our voices on big tech social media platforms, by stifling us in the mainstream media, and by packing the polling places with criminal illegal aliens that shouldn't be here in the first place."
"I'm assuming that the attorney general is a lawyer," Block said. "As a lawyer, he should be fully aware that hearsay anecdotal evidence is not acceptable evidence in any court of law. What he's doing is he is parroting campaign propaganda. He's not making legal statements."
"In my world, and what I was hired to do for the Trump campaign -- and within the context of what the campaign was doing in the month of November 2020, which was trying to make an ironclad legal case that the election should have been overturned -- not a word that you just read me that came from your attorney general could ever had been used in any of the court cases in which I was considering evidence at the time."
Block also raised questions about Bailey's prediction that noncitizens would violate federal law and risk deportation to cast a single vote.
"There's no evidence, other than unbacked up statements, that there's a lot of noncitizen voting," Block said. "I haven't seen it. And I question whether somebody who wants to remain here and doesn't really want to stick their head up, I question why they would choose to cast an illegal vote."
Bailey's GOP primary challenger Will Scharf echoed Bailey's claims that President Joe Biden's victory was illegitimate and highlighted pandemic-era moves from some states to expand mail balloting to prevent mass crowds from gathering in person.
"Yeah, it was stolen. It was rigged. Call it whatever you will," Scharf said. "In the 2020 election, out of 159 million ballots cast, over 100 [million] of them were early or absentee. It's absolutely unprecedented in American history. Many of those ballots were cast totally extra legally. Whether it was a lack of signature verification, whether it was the late submissions in Pennsylvania, you can go on and on and on."
"Well, there were court challenges to some of the rules changes that were made," Block replied. "So the court system has weighed in on a lot of what I believe his claims were in terms of whether or not the rules were changed in a legal manner."
Block's book, which includes a foreword from Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, spells out in specific detail how he tracked down tips, leads and rumors to their end, and how often those claims that went viral on social media fell apart under any careful scrutiny.
"One of the things that my contract didn't foresee was the Trump campaign asking me to vet claims of voter fraud that came into the campaign made by others," Block said. "And there were dozens of claims like that. And I was able to help the campaign assess the claims and in for the ones that I looked at in every single circumstance, I could show the campaign why the claim was false, prove it with data that backed it up. And as a result of the work that we did, there were lawsuits that were intended to be filed using these claims of voter fraud that never got filed. Because I was able to show that the claim didn't hold any water."
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