KEITH BALMER: Welcome to the Office of Elections here in the city of Richmond.

And I just want to give you a little tour about how we operate here.

ANGIE MILES: Keith Balmer seems excited to talk about his job.

KEITH BALMER: Here is the voter registration team.

Their job is to process voter registration applications as we get them.

On Election Day, this is the hub... ANGIE MILES: as the Chief of Elections for the city of Richmond, he oversees staff and systems for 72 voting precincts.

KEITH BALMER: The way it works on Election Day is that we ask our precinct chiefs at our 72 different voting locations to once the results tape print from the machine, call us as soon as possible.

ANGIE MILES: Okay.

KEITH BALMER: Because the media and the public want those results.

ANGIE MILES: Listen closely and you might detect a sense of pride.

KEITH BALMER: And this is where I must speak up for my colleagues, not just in Henrico, Chesterfield and the greater Richmond area, but across the state.

We all train our election officials on how to use the poll books and the voting equipment.

And we we train them on how to do all the paperwork to ensure, again, that our process is conducted with integrity.

So I'm gonna stand up for my colleagues.

Take a moment.

ANGIE MILES: As Balmer describes being serious, careful, even meticulous in getting everything right as he and colleagues statewide make the most of technology and more expansive voting methods to conduct inclusive, honest elections.

KEITH BALMER: So there are regulations that mandate registrars, if they're going to use a drop box, we must be able to record and keep that footage of the drop box for as long as we have it, until the state Board of Elections certifies the results of the election in December.

So this is our Tritek machine, which it is awesome.

So we can just put a batch of ballots in the machine and just open them all up and then it can actually distribute them based on precinct.

ANGIE MILES: Election security has become a point of contention in recent years.

Balmer says that the law, the election worker vetting process, the training and the reasons people come forward to be election workers in the first place help to ensure the integrity of the vote.

KEITH BALMER: But what I want more so than anything else is for the public to trust the people who are running elections.

We don't have an agenda.

We're not changing votes.

We're counting votes.

ANGIE MILES: But there is a huge trust gap and it's visible by party.

You can see that Democrats have high trust in election results, and election officials.

Republicans, to a large extent, mostly trust Donald Trump.

Nationally and statewide, the evidence shows election wrongdoing is practically nonexistent.

In Virginia, in the past decade, there have been, on average, just two voter fraud convictions each year.

Half of those are connected to a single case where staffers of a Republican congressman were convicted of falsifying signatures to get a third party candidate on the ballot as a way to help their boss.

KEN BLOCK: The narrative that only Democrats commit voter fraud is absolutely incorrect.

It's a bipartisan endeavor when it happens, but it happens in very small quantities.

There's not a lot of people who are going to risk a felony that involves five years in jail and up to $10,000 in fines to take two bites of the electoral apple.

ANGIE MILES: After the contested 2020 election, the Trump campaign hired Ken Block's firm to investigate whether widespread cheating had cost Trump the election.

And what were those results?

KEN BLOCK: There was not sufficient voter fraud to have impacted any of the election results in any of the swing states.

That's a cold, hard fact.

ANGIE MILES: Block says any report suggesting that voter fraud is rampant is probably misleading and may be driven by partisan agendas instead of by facts.

We asked him to review a white paper that made the claim that Virginia is plagued by voting irregularities.

KEN BLOCK: Published by a firm called Virginia Analytics.

This purported to be a scientific look at what happened in 2020.

When you look at the claims that were made in this white paper in Albemarle County, there were a couple of precincts that were highlighted as having many more votes cast than there were registered voters.

And the claim was made that in some of these precincts, thousands of votes were cast.

But when I looked at the data from the county, the number of votes cast in 2020 for those precincts was in the hundreds, not the thousands.

And nobody in Virginia should pay that report much heed.

ANGIE MILES: Block once ran as a Republican for governor of Rhode Island after founding a moderate party in that state.

He says the real reason Trump came up short of votes in 2020 is that scores of GOP moderates supported down-ballot Republicans but did not vote for Trump.

In “Disproven,” his new book, Block suggest ways to improve voting processes.

He says by focusing so much attention on a non-existent problem, voter fraud, America is overlooking a much bigger issue.

KEN BLOCK: What people who consume conservative media need to understand is that they're only hearing one half of the story.

And what they're not hearing is any factual evidence that refutes those claims of fraud.

ANGIE MILES: Block says if Americans can have regular access to the same information presented factually, the country will be better equipped to handle its ballot business and much more with greater confidence and trust.