In 2020, former President Donald Trump commissioned a research project to produce evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election, but buried the results when they research group found nothing, The Washington Post reports.
The Trump campaign paid research company Berkeley Research Group through a subsidiary called East Bay Dispute and Advisory fees of “more than $600,000 in the final weeks of 2020.” The Post’s report says that other outside research firms were hired as well, likely making the total fees paid out much higher.
Around “a dozen” researchers were involved, including “econonmetricians” who used “statistics to model and predict outcomes,” digging into “at least a dozen hypotheses,” according to The Post.
From The Post: “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,” said a person familiar with the work who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private research and meetings. “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 over 60 court cases that Trump lost in his effort to overturn the 2020 election, Berkeley’s research never made an appearance. “None of the findings were presented to the public or in court,” wrote The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey.
During their work researchers found the usual election issues — 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.” The research also debunked some of Trump’s voter fraud conspiracy theories, such as rigged voting machines.
Read the full report over at The Washington Post.
