Imagine you are one of the millions of high school students who take the Scholastic Aptitude Test in your senior year. You get your results and believe the company that administers the test, the College Board, made a serious mistake. You must have scored much higher than they say. A few people you know think you could be right, but most people you talk to are doubtful. You sue the College Board and a judge, citing your lack of evidence, quickly dismisses your case. So you spend thousands of dollars hiring a respected research firm to confirm your suspicions. They find out if other students are disputing the results. They look at your grades and previous test results. They even give you a practice test and your score is no better than the official result you got in the mail. Would anybody believe you if you said you just know you scored much higher?

Now imagine that you ran for president and lost. From The Washington Post:

Former president T____’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral fraud claims, but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter. A person familiar with the findings said there were at least a dozen hypotheses that T____’s team wanted tested.

The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined were voter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help T____ show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court.

About a dozen people at the firm worked on the report, including econometricians, who use statistics to model and predict outcomes, the people said. The work was carried out in the final weeks of 2020, before the Jan. 6 riot of T____ supporters at the U.S. Capitol….

“They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted,” said a person familiar with the work who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private research and meetings. “Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it.”

The findings were not what the T____ campaign had been hoping for, according to the four people. While the researchers believed there were voting anomalies and unusual data patterns in a few states, along with some instances in which laws may have been skirted, they did not believe the anomalies were significant enough to make a difference in who won the election….

“None of these were significant enough,” this person said. “Just like any election, there are always errors, omissions and irregularities. It was nowhere close enough to what they wanted to prove, and it actually went in both directions”….

The research group’s officials maintained privately that they did not come into the research with any predetermined conclusions and simply wanted to examine the data provided by the T____ campaign in the battleground states….

The findings from Berkeley were among the many streams of information after the election that showed T____ he lost. According to testimony presented to the Jan. 6 committee, T____ was repeatedly told by advisers that he did not win the election, but continued to cast about for others who would entertain his theories and say that he had won. Dozens of judges — including many T____ appointees — rejected his campaign’s attempts to challenge election results in court….

The Berkeley research was done through a subsidiary company called East Bay Dispute and Advisory. FEC filings show the T____ campaign paid East Bay Dispute and Advisory more than $600,000 in the final weeks of 2020. A person familiar with the matter said there were also other researchers commissioned to help prove electoral fraud from outside Berkeley Research Group…..

Those who worked on the report included Janet Thornton, who has about 40 years of experience in accounting and investigations, according to Berkeley Research Group’s website. [The] professional biographies [of others] describe decades of experience in accounting, investigating corporate fraud and handling other complicated inquiries.

They didn’t make the company’s findings public because they just know he won.