Former U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s campaign paid a software engineer and former third party Rhode Island gubernatorial candidate $750,000 to scour the 2020 presidential election results for evidence of fraud.

“I can’t get much deeper into any of the particulars of what I did for the Trump campaign right now, because these are still ongoing legal matters,” Ken Block told the Warwick Rotary Club last week. “There’s probably a 50/50 chance I’ll have to go testify in one or more trials. They have all my documents so they don’t need me to testify.”

Block, a long-time critic of the established two-party system of government, owns Warwick-based Simpatico Software Systems. In the wake of the pandemic he closed the office and has been working remotely.  He was sought out by some of Trump’s lesser-known lawyers and determined to be an honest, non-biased broker capable of pouring through voter data to determine if Trump’s loss was valid or if systemic fraud had stolen the election (as claimed repeatedly by Trump since his loss to current President Joe Biden).

“It would be pretty compelling story-telling to have the guy who was paid to look for voter fraud in-person say there was no voter fraud,” Block explained. “So I’m expecting I’ll have to do that at some point. I don’t want to, but I’m not going have a choice in that matter.”

The founder of the Moderate Party of Rhode Island, the Ocean State's third-largest political party, Block unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2010. He’s been a vocal political gadfly, buzzing around issues from the 38 Studios bailout debacle to the fight against Sakonnet River Bridge tolling. He also worked with Warwick activist Rob Cote in auditing Warwick firefighter overtime and vacation pay, finding firefighters received $400,000 in excess pay.

Block said he was drafted into the post-election drama “the day after the 2020 election.”

“My cell phone rang,” he recalled. “It was a top lawyer for the Trump campaign, who asked me if I would very kindly look to see if there was voter fraud involved in the outcome of the 2020 election. It was a very difficult decision, to decide to do it or not to do it. Ultimately I convinced my family that I should do it — that I was one of the few people capable of doing it in an unbiased way.”

Block had “a decade of experience, working with national voting data from all over the country.”

“It would be OK,” he told himself. “It would be low-key.”

Block had hoped to stay out of the national media spotlight.

“As I negotiated the contract with the campaign, the decision was made to shield me from all political pressures,” Block said. “My identity wasn’t going to be known, particularly to the White House, or anybody outside of the small group of lawyers who were conducting this audit.”

The Trump campaign told Block they were desperate. He accepted the assignment.

“So, we started what became a very intense month of looking at voter data from everywhere,” Block recalled. “Not only was I looking on my own, to determine if we could discover whether fraud had occurred, one day after the contract was signed, I was then being asked by the campaign to assess claims of voter fraud that came from literally everywhere.”

According to Block’s contract, he was “only tasked with looking at the claims of voter fraud whose foundations were in data.” He wasn’t hired to investigate claims of hidden boxes of ballots or other human malfeasance. He was hired to examine the data and answer a set of very specific questions.

“Were dead voters voting?” Block recited the questions aloud for the Rotary audience seated in the Post Road Chelo’s banquet room. “Did people vote multiple times in different states?”

Block said some of the “claims of voter fraud” he encountered “were very complex.”

“My work and these issues are in front of Jack Smith’s court case in D.C. right now,” Block said.

On Nov. 18, 2022, U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Jack Smith as Special Counsel authorized to investigate interference with the peaceful transition of power following the 2020 presidential election (including the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection riots and storming of the U.S. Capital building).

Eventually, Block’s role with the Trump campaign was exposed by a series of stories by The Washington Post. The newspaper discovered that Block had received a subpoena from Smith requesting all the documents related to his work for the Trump campaign.

“Two weeks after that, I got a knock on my door, and I received a subpoena from a different legal matter that nobody knows about, because they had seen The Post’s stories, and they asked for all of my materials for that legal matter,” Block said. “And after that … I got a subpoena from the Fulton County Georgia prosecutor’s office asking me for all of my materials, related to my work for the Trump campaign in that legal matter.”

While he avoided revealing specifics from his investigation, Block offered a potent summation of his work.

“So, without telling you anything that hasn’t already been discussed in the media, what I can say without hesitation and with firm conviction, is that there was no voter fraud of any sort of sufficient quantity to have changed the result of any election in 2020,” Block said last week. “No state’s results could be overturned based on fraud determined by looking at voter data. And that’s a pretty important statement. I don’t know if that statement has ever been formally spoken the way I just did. I arrived at these results because I was paid by the Trump campaign to look for them. And there’s no quibbling about them. This isn’t opinion. This is fact.”