Following the 2020 presidential election, the Trump campaign paid an outside research firm in a bid to prove his claims that the election was “rigged” and “stolen,” but he refused to release the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner.
As reported by The Washington Post, the Trump campaign in the final weeks of 2020 paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group more than $600,000 to dig into 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts.
Among the areas examined were voter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting, and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, as he continues to claim. Around “a dozen” researchers were involved, including “econometricians,” who used “statistics to model and predict outcomes,” digging into “at least a dozen hypotheses,” according to WaPo.
At the end of the proverbial day, none of the findings were presented to the public or in court.
According to a person familiar with the work who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private research and meetings, the researchers “looked at everything.”
They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted.
Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it.
In the more than 60 court cases Trump lost in his effort to overturn the 2020 election, Berkeley’s research never made an appearance.
The researchers did find the usual election irregularities according to WaPo: a few “voting anomalies,” “unusual data patterns,” and “some instances in which laws may have been skirted,” but none of it was “significant enough to make a difference in who won the election.”
Researchers also debunked some of Trump’s voter fraud conspiracy theories, such as rigged voting machines.
Here’s more from WaPo:
The findings were not what the Trump campaign had been hoping for, according to the four people. While the researchers believed there were voting anomalies and unusual data patterns in a few states, along with some instances in which laws may have been skirted, they did not believe the anomalies were significant enough to make a difference in who won the election.
The research group’s officials maintained privately that they did not come into the research with any predetermined conclusions and simply wanted to examine the data provided by the Trump campaign in the battleground states.
In reaction to the researchers’ findings, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said:
President Trump received a record-breaking 74 million votes, the most of any sitting president in the history of the country. Anyone who takes a look at Joe Biden glitching through his presidency knows who really won the election.
Not to nitpick, but the disastrous actions and results of Biden’s miserable presidency have zero to do with showing “who really won the election.”
So, it stands to reason that the researchers’ findings and conclusions were the last thing Team Trump wanted to hear, as I suggested earlier. or it would have released the finding in a New York minute. Donald Trump would have trumpeted the results at every opportunity, as would any candidate in any election who believes an election was stolen from him — or her.
The Bottom Line
Those who believe the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen” will never believe it wasn’t, regardless of the lack of substantive evidence that it was.
Thing is, it wouldn’t make a modicum of difference who believes what about the 2020 election, if it doesn’t metastasize in the 2024 election.
I’ll leave it there for now, but I will say this: if arguably the worst president in history continues to do his damnedest to destroy America as we know it wins re-election in 2024, not only will the Republican Party, but conservatism as well, miss a golden opportunity to stop the destruction wrought by Joe Biden and the radicalized Democrat Party.