Longtime Republican election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg issued a blunt rebuke to GOP claims of widespread voter fraud as President Trump looks to cast doubt over election procedures heading into November.
Ginsberg, who has represented four Republican presidential candidates and played a key role in cases like Bush v. Gore in the 2000 election, wrote in The Washington Post that a “lack of evidence” makes claims of fraud from Trump and other Republicans “unsustainable” and that the GOP is needlessly inciting concerns over the presidential race.
“I’ve been looking for 38 years on Election Days, along with literally legions of other Republican lawyers and political operatives, for elections that are rigged in fraud,” Ginsburg added that while it is true that there is an occasional election where you can prove fraud, “those are caught.”
“Elections and the credibility of the results of the elections is a fundamental bedrock of our democracy, and to say overall that elections are rigged and fraudulent and the only way I can win is if there’s cheating going on, is just not borne out by 38 years of looking for those incidents, and it’s time for the Republican Party to basically deal with that reality in what they do,” he wrote.
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“The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud. At most, there are isolated incidents — by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged. Absentee ballots use the same process as mail-in ballots — different states use different labels for the same process.”
“The president’s rhetoric has put my party in the position of a firefighter who deliberately sets fires to look like a hero putting them out,” he added. “Calling elections ‘fraudulent’ and results ‘rigged’ with almost nonexistent evidence is antithetical to being the ‘rule of law’ party.”
The op-ed comes after a string of comments from Trump criticizing mail-in voting. The president has suggested, without evidence, that it is ripe for widespread fraud.
