The election analyst Newt Gingrich trusts has a word for 2020, and it isn’t “stolen”

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice

Stolen is the wrong word.

Seth Keshel says so himself. And Keshel is a retired Army intelligence captain who has spent nearly six years tagged in headlines as an election denier and a conspiracy theorist.

Ask him the obvious question—was the 2020 election stolen—and he says no. He says something else.

“I don’t believe the elections are stolen. I believe that they’re rigged,” Keshel said. “And that’s what Newt Gingrich believes too.”

Keshel, a former Army captain of military intelligence and Afghanistan veteran, built a second career reading election returns the way he once read a battlefield.

His book, The American War on Election Corruption, reached No. 1 in three Amazon categories this spring and carries a foreword by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who calls Keshel “the leading analyst of voter registration in America” with an “encyclopedic command of the data that most political professionals either overlook or simply do not possess.” RMV readers will hear from Keshel at Freedom Fest on June 26.

Keshel draws a distinction that supporters and critics sometimes miss. He does not say someone flipped votes inside a machine on election night.

He says the result was set months ahead, through changes to election law—chiefly automatic voter registration and the spread of mail-in voting. In his telling the cheating is legal, written into the rules themselves.

Colorado votes almost entirely by mail, the kind of system Keshel argues makes fraud easier.

“None of my arguments have anything to do with Donald Trump,” he said. “People already believe Republicans are better at every policy than Democrats are. They already believe that. It’s Republicans that win on immigration, they win on law enforcement, they win on taxes, they win on business environment, they win on almost every policy point.”

Keshel believes election results should reflect the views voters already hold.

For Keshel, that is one reason election integrity remains worth fighting for.

Before the election maps and mail-ballot debates, he was a kid studying the backs of baseball cards.

Baseball cards to the battlefield

Keshel traces all of it to one habit.

“All of my stops along the way of my life have prepared me to understand making complicated things simple for the layperson,” he said.

It started with those baseball cards. He could not play at a high level, he said, so he kept the numbers instead—first for a nationally ranked high school program, then at Ole Miss.

“From an early age I was able to understand numbers and trends, just reading the back of baseball cards,” Keshel said.

At Ole Miss, he helped develop a way to evaluate both his own team and its opponents using data.

“We developed a first of its kind, a full decade before analytics became big in baseball, a system of evaluating our own players and sharpening their approaches at the plate, evaluating opposing talent to field the best possible team armed with real data and information,” he said.

The military came next, and the scale jumped.

His intelligence work in Afghanistan covered ground the size of Georgia, he said—”the state, not the nation”—sorting daily reports into something commanders could act on.

Whether it was baseball, Afghanistan or election returns, Keshel said the job was the same: sort through a mountain of information and figure out what counts.

Rigged, not stolen

He starts with what he is not arguing.

“A lot of people seem to think the 2020 election was just this big light switch—somebody flipped a switch and all the numbers changed,” Keshel said.

“I’ve gone back and tracked the changes to automatic voter registration, then the expansion of mail-in balloting, and I believe that is what caused the results to change.”

Georgia is his go-to example.

The state adopted automatic voter registration in September 2016, under Republican officials—Brian Kemp was secretary of state then. That was “not enough time to alter the outcome” of a race Trump carried by more than five points, Keshel said. 

He argues the four years between elections allowed voter rolls to grow, particularly around Atlanta. By 2020 mail voting ran more than five times its 2016 level, and Biden took Georgia by roughly 12,000 votes.

“There’s your reason why Biden was able to overcome Trump’s very strong gain in the state,” he said.

Keshel’s approach has drawn criticism from election officials and fact-checkers who say registration trends and vote totals do not establish fraud.

Keshel does not claim they do.

“It’s not proof. But it’s a very interesting fact,” he said.

“In the 2020 election, every meaningful trend indicator, bellwether and predictor that we’ve had, some going as far back as 1888, were broken. I think that something so anomalous requires a deeper look as to how something like that happened.”

A state he calls Calirado

Keshel has a nickname for Colorado.

He calls it Calirado.

“My wife grew up there, in Aurora,” he said.

He describes her memories of the late 1990s, when California plates became more common and the drive west into the mountains grew more crowded.

He also points to TABOR as an overlooked piece of Colorado’s political shift.

The Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, he said, gave moderate voters confidence they could elect Democrats without worrying about major tax increases.

Keshel’s Colorado critique goes beyond migration and politics.

Keshel put many of those ideas into a 2022 post titled The Ten Points to True Election Integrity.

When asked what would make the biggest difference in Colorado from the list, he came back to voter rolls.

“Cleaning out the voter roll, dumping automatic voter registration,” he said.

“Automatic voter registration keeps an increasing supply of bad registrations in the system. And then when you pair it with a state like yours with a universal mail-in voting system, then you wind up with a recipe for disaster.”

He returned to the same point a moment later.

“Voter rolls are the foundation of the election corruption,” he said.

Colorado is one of the states he returns to again and again.

Why he stays on the road

Keshel said the work has cost him professionally and personally.

When I asked what keeps him going, he answered with a line from An Officer and a Gentleman.

“I got nowhere else to go,” he said.

A moment later, he clarified.

“Ultimately I believe in what I do,” Keshel said. “I believe that if we’re going to have a future that we can hand down to coming generations, then we have to be able to fix our elections.”

He casts the fight as an old American habit.

“It’s not an American thing to trust government,” he said.

He gives little ground to his critics.

“I don’t take any of it seriously. Everybody else, I believe, is completely wrong,” he said.

“Now, that’s not to say that other people in election integrity don’t have ideas worth considering.”

Keshel speaks at the RMV Freedom Festival on June 26. The two-day event runs June 26-27 at the Douglas County Fairgrounds in Castle Rock, marking America’s 250th birthday and Colorado’s 150th.

Near the end of the conversation, Keshel came back to a phrase he’d used earlier.

“Colorado’s suffering under electile dysfunction, just like many other places,” he said. “And unless that stops, we’ve got a serious number of issues.”