Published 12 February 2023 at 12.18
Foreign. A research group hired by ex-president Donald Trump's campaign found some flaws in the US election, but not enough to question Biden's election victory. The report was then buried by Trump's campaign, writes the Washington Post.
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A research firm hired by Trump's team was supposed to show that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, but failed to find evidence to back up the theory.
As a result, the Washington Post writes, the results of the study were not made public or presented in court.
According to four “people familiar with the matter,” the Trump campaign hired Berkeley Research Group to examine the 2020 election results in six states .
The company investigated many circumstances that could substantiate the ex-president's accusations that the election had been “stolen” from him.
– They looked at everything: changes of address, illegal immigrants, ballot collection, people who voted twice… turnout discrepancies, date of birth discrepancies, whether dead people voted, says a source.
However, the results proved disappointing for the Trump campaign. Although the firm found some irregularities and signs that laws may have been broken in some cases, these anomalies were not enough to cast doubt on whether Joe Biden had indeed won the 2020 election.
– There are always errors, shortcomings and irregularities. But we never came close to proving what we wanted to prove, and the irregularities actually went both ways, the source said.
As a result, none of the investigation's findings were released to the public or asserted in court.
Berkeley's research took place in late 2020, before Trump supporters stormed the US Congress on January 6, 2021 to stop the final ratification of the election results that took place there.
Before and after the November 2020 election, Trump repeatedly pointed to alleged voter fraud, while also attacking mail-in voting and claiming that some voting machines had been rigged.
His team has filed multiple lawsuits in an attempt to overturn the election results, many of them have been rejected, including by the US Supreme Court.
In November 2022, Trump officially announced that he would run for re-election in 2024, while promising to “eliminate cheating” by pushing for new election standards and require a that only paper ballots should be counted.