No one had done this before': Data expert details major push to investigate 2020 voter fraud
President's legal team, FBI have sought out voter data gathered by veteran tech worker.
"I had some ideas in the aftermath of the election about ways to resolve whether or not there was voter fraud or illegal ballots cast in a way that I thought would be definitive," said Matt Braynard, the director of the Voter Integrity Project, in a podcast interview for John Solomon Reports. "Because, you know, in the day or two after the election, there were all kinds of crazy theories, things that I would consider hearsay or speculation."
"I thought that, you know, I've got some skills here," Braynard told this reporter, acting as guest host for the podcast episode. "I've got a pretty strong background in this area."
Braynard, the director of strategy for the Trump 2016 campaign, has been working in the field of voter data since the 1990s. His resume includes stints in the Republican National Committee's political analysis department as well as with the company Election Data Services, which Braynard called "the nation's premier election administration and redistricting firm."
"I have a pretty intimate understanding of not how a bill is made, but how a vote is made," he said, "all the way back to how voters register, the different ways they vote, and then the ways those votes get counted and tabulated. This is stuff I've been intimately familiar with, gosh, for going on 25 years now."
His initial, tentative efforts to explore voter fraud in the recent election led to a major crowdfunding campaign on the website GoFundMe, which raised well over $200,000, according to Braynard. But that service subsequently removed the crowdfunding campaign, citing alleged election misinformation.
"We never said that we're out here to prove there was voter fraud or to demonstrate it, or we're going to flip this election with this investigation," Braynard said. "We were always about, 'Well, look, here's some techniques that can potentially detect problems.'"
A subsequent fundraiser on the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, Braynard said.
'You've got to pick the rock up'
Armed with a sizable budget, Braynard said he and his team set up a major calling operation to reach out to voters whose votes they had flagged as being potentially suspicious.
"I wanted names," he said, "and phone numbers, and addresses, and declarations signed, and affidavits in mass quantities of numbers, because that's the only thing that really would make a difference," given the margins of victories in the election.
Braynard said their investigations revealed significant quantities of suspect voter data. For instance, his team reached out to voters "who had requested an absentee ballot, but not returned it based on the state's data."
"[A]mong the population of those who did not return the absentee ballot," he said, "we found [a] high percentage across the board never requested it. I think the highest percentage we found was in Arizona. Forty-four percent of those people never requested the absentee ballot."
"We also found among the people who said they did request it, who didn't return it, a substantial number of them actually said, 'Yes, I did return it,'" he said.
Using data sources such as the National Change of Address database and voter registration records on citizens who have moved from one place to another, Braynard said his team found "a substantial number" of voters who may have voted in a state they did not live in.
Braynard said his team found numerous examples of suspicious arrangements, including "thousands of votes in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan" for which voters had reportedly listed a postal facility as their residence, something he said was against the law.
He also cited Wisconsin's "indefinitely confined" voter policy, which this year was significantly broadened due to the COVID-19 pandemic and which allowed voters to submit a ballot without meeting voter ID requirements.
"Basically, we took a random sample of [those voters]," he said. "And we found that of those who we could identify with social media profiles, 44% of them were clearly not indefinitely confined."
Braynard said his team has been "sharing data and having conversations with some of the president's attorneys, their legal teams, and some of the legal groups that are working in parallel or independently," such as the Amistad Project.
Braynard also noted that the FBI has contacted his team to review his data. "All I'm going to say is we're going to completely cooperate," he said.
The data maven admitted that he wasn't sure if all the time and money invested in his investigations would yield the kind of compelling evidence that has turned up in the last few weeks.
"You never know until you spend the money," he said. "You never know if there's a bunch of creepy crawlies under that rock in the swamp until you pick the rock up."
"You've got to pick the rock up," he said.
You can listen to Braynard's full interview on John Solomon Reports by clicking here.
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