Trump team canned election fraud study – WaPo
A research company contracted by former US President Donald Trump's team, to prove his claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, has failed to find evidence to back up the theory, the Washington Post reported Saturday, citing sources. As a result, the paper claimed, the findings were not made public or presented in court.
According to four “people familiar with the matter,” the Trump campaign hired Berkeley Research Group to look into 2020 election results in six states. The firm examined numerous factors that could vindicate the ex-president’s allegations that the election had been “stolen” from him.
“They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice… voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted,” one source said.
The results, however, turned out to be disappointing for the Trump campaign, sources claimed. While the firm is believed to have found some voting irregularities as well as signs that in some instances laws may have been skirted, these anomalies apparently were not enough to cast doubt on whether Joe Biden had, indeed, won the 2020 election.
“There are always errors, omissions and irregularities. It was nowhere close enough to what they wanted to prove, and it actually went in both directions,” a WaPo source explained.
As a result, none of the investigation's findings were either released to the public or in court, the report claims. Berkeley's research took place in late 2020 before Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 to stop the final ratification of the presidential election results that was taking place there.
In the run-up to and after the November 2020 election, Trump repeatedly pointed to alleged election fraud, while also attacking mail-in voting and claiming that some voting machines had been rigged. His team has filed numerous lawsuits in an attempt to overturn the election results, many of them getting dismissed, including by the US Supreme Court.
In November 2022, Trump officially announced that he would seek reelection in 2024, while vowing to “eliminate cheating” by pushing for new voter identification standards and demanding that only paper ballots must be counted.
