Donald Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is notorious for good reason. On Jan. 2, 2021, as the then-president searched for ways to maintain power despite his election defeat, Trump appealed to the Georgia Republican to “find” votes that would flip the state’s election results. All of this, of course, is the basis for an ongoing criminal investigation.
But as part of the same conversation, Trump, citing research he didn’t identify, said, “So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number, and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.”
Not surprisingly, the then-president was point to data that he’d just made up. What is surprising is the information that was available to him at the time. The Washington Post reported:
[A] report commissioned by his own campaign dated one day prior told a different story: Researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence” of only nine dead voters in Fulton County, defined as ballots that may have been cast by someone else in the name of a deceased person. They believed there was a “potential statewide exposure” of 23 such votes across the Peach State — or 4,977 fewer than the “minimum” Trump claimed.
A similar story unfolded in Nevada, where the former president’s lawyers claimed there were 1,506 ballots cast in the names of dead people, while Trump’s own researchers concluded there were, in reality, maybe as many as 20 such examples statewide.
The research came by way of the Berkeley Research Group, which as we discussed last month, is well known in legal and corporate circles as a leading consulting firm with prominent clients. When Trump’s political operation set out to scrutinize the 2020 presidential election, and it sought out expert researchers, it turned to BRG to do the heavy lifting.
In fact, the Post reported several weeks ago that…
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