A data analyst who formerly worked for Trump explains what needs to change.
Whether you stayed up late watching returns or woke to the news on Wednesday morning, the results are finally clear: Donald Trump has won the presidency for a second time. His victory comes after a surprising turn of events, including four indictments, two assassination attempts, and a new rival after Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden atop the Democratic ticket.
Despite massive turnout by early voters, the election itself went relatively smoothly, save for a couple of technical malfunctions and a few non-credible bomb threats to polling locations in several states, including Georgia.
Still, voting analyst Ken Block believes the U.S. can stand to improve our confusing, and at times chaotic, voting process. And Block knows the system very well: He was hired by Donald Trump to investigate alleged voter fraud in 2020, and he ended up debunking those false claims — and explaining why and how in his book, Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.
“There are many places where we can and should improve things because we use a system that’s evolved over hundreds of years,” Block tells us. “But if we were to sit down and design a system from scratch, we would never design what we have right now.”
In our wide-ranging conversation, Block discussed why Trump’s win surprised him and what he hopes officials address before the next election.
Katie Couric Media: First, I wanted to get your thoughts on Donald Trump’s win. Did it take you by surprise?
Ken Block: It certainly wasn’t predicted in any of the polling I was looking at. It caught everybody by surprise, including probably the Trump campaign. I don’t think anybody was expecting a landslide, myself included.
In the lead-up to Nov. 5 and on Election Day itself, Trump and his allies made unsubstantiated claims that there was “massive cheating” at the polls. Was there any actual voter fraud?
It’s true that many people pointed out what happened and interpreted it as fraud. But I haven’t seen any of those pan out to actual fraud. For example, in Rhode Island, some folks were out in front of a polling place with ballots that had been marked up showing voters who to vote for, and there were some claims that this was some form of election interference. But it didn’t go anywhere. Trump and his allies still pushed these claims, but once it was clear that he would win, no one bothered with them.
I wanted to ask you about the bomb threats at Georgia polling locations. Since those turned out to be hoaxes, could they be considered fraud as well?
That’s more like election interference. In general, you must evaluate each claim individually, but the result [of Trump’s victory] was so overwhelming and uniform across the country. Trump did better than he did in 2020 virtually everywhere. Fraud can’t possibly explain that — it’s a national trend. Just like 2020 was a national trend, when Trump did pretty much uniformly worse nationwide than in 2016.
What does Tuesday’s outcome say about the future of our election security?
It will be very interesting to see what happens at this point. Election integrity has been a key element of Trump’s talking points, and the RNC was also focused on it. There’s been an awful lot of talk about integrity. I’m very hopeful that that focus can be put towards productive use because there are things, for sure, that we should be doing in terms of election integrity that can improve our systems, even though we’re not seeing any evidence of substantial enough fraud to have altered any election results.
For instance, we have states with really dirty voter rolls and uneven maintenance of data from state to state. We also have voting laws in some states that are very different from laws in other states, such as what happens to someone’s ballot if they pass away right after sending it in. The answer is that it depends on where they live. In a third of the states, the vote counts, and in a third of the states, the vote doesn’t count. In the other third of the states, there needs to be a law or regulation that addresses this situation.
That unevenness is unfair: You can have a different outcome from a voter’s perspective depending on where you live. That scenario should yield the same result across the country right now, and it doesn’t.
We can and should improve things in many places because we use a system that’s evolved over hundreds of years. But if we were to sit down and design a system from scratch, we would never design what we have right now.
So, would our election system be fairer if it were more uniform?
Although we’re not looking at systemic fraud anywhere, millions of duplicate registrations are scattered across the country because states have difficulty knowing when somebody’s registered in multiple states. Some states effectively remove dead voters; other states don’t.
So, the differences in how we conduct our elections and the general quality of the data from state to state are prime areas for improvement. We have the technology and the capabilities to do that sort of thing. The fact that some states are exempt from things like the National Voting Rights Act. Why aren’t all states playing by the same rules?
This isn’t about trying to carve out an advantage for one political party or another. We should enforce data standards across the board so states are compelled to fix their issues.
Which states could improve their electoral systems?
New York has astonishing problems with its data, and its systems are in desperate need of an upgrade. A million active registered voters in New York State have been registered for 20 years and haven’t voted in 20 years. Now, some of them are dead, and some have moved away. So, if New York State cleaned up its voter rolls and better maintained its data, its voter turnout would improve by seven percentage points.
New York also has different systems for its elections. What you have is a really non-standardized mess when it comes to its data. And New York State shouldn’t be allowed to have such a mess on its hands when other states have their act very much together.
Which states have ideal election systems?
Georgia and Nevada are both excellent. Ohio has very few dormant people in voting roles, as does Minnesota. But, of course, there are different reasons for why some states are better or not better.
Minnesota and Ohio have different rules that they follow regarding when they can remove voters from the rolls once they believe those voters are no longer in the state and it’s working for them. And you don’t hear anybody complaining in those states that they’re improperly removing voters.
Speaking of improperly removing voters, conservatives had pushed to purge people, particularly people of color and naturalized citizens, from voting rolls right before the election. What do you make of that timing?
The problem with the purging that happened within the last two months is it happened right on top of an election. It’s too easy of a target to look at that and claim that the activity has more to do with suppression than integrity.
It’s not just something that Republicans do — Democrats do this, too. Both sides jockey for advantage, but the maintenance of voter data should not be a place where that happens. And I’m advocating for looking at all this work as a technical endeavor rather than a political endeavor to improve our election systems.
I’d also love to explore doing away with the states registering voters. We should just have a single federal voter registration that is given to you when you’re born or naturalized. The idea of registering to vote was implemented in the 1930s as a voter suppression mechanism.
Obviously, things are very politically divisive. Who would be in the right position to lead that change?
It’s not a conversation we’ve been able to even have as a country just yet because we’ve been in the throes of a presidential election for the last two years. Now that it’s over, we have a fairly decent lead time before the next one starts.
As the presidential transition progresses and things get going, it’s time to explore these questions and figure them out. There are plenty of democracies around the world, including Europe, that have far better technological underpinnings than we do right now.
We have all these different ways to vote, like in-person voting and early voting. As you digest the results, it’s incredibly confusing because in-person votes on election day are delivered at a different time than mail ballots. I had friends in local elections in Rhode Island, and as we watched the results, I realized that we were only looking at partial data. I’m an expert in elections and data, yet I even got confused about where the vote reporting was. So we can do things far better than we are now.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
