Top GOP election lawyer slams Trump's vote fraud claims, says the GOP searched fruitlessly for decades

"Legions of Republican lawyers have searched in vain over four decades for fraudulent double voting," Benjamin Ginsberg, a newly retired top Republican Party election lawyer, writes in a Washington Post op-ed published late Tuesday. "At long last, they have a blatant example of a major politician urging his supporters to illegally vote twice. The only hitch is that the candidate is President Trump."

Trump's repeated exhortations to commit vote fraud, paired with his frequent claims that the election will be "rigged" and "fraudulent," are "doubly wrong," Ginsberg writes. They make the GOP's "torrent of 2020 voting litigation" look like "transactional hypocrisy," and they are false. "The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there's no proof of widespread fraud," he concedes. "At most, there are isolated incidents — by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged."

"These are painful conclusions for me to reach," Ginsberg adds, setting out an overview of his "38 years in the GOP's legal trenches," including serving as counsel to the Republican National Committee and six of the last four GOP presidential nominees.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The GOP lawyers and conservative activists found only a "minuscule" amount of fraud, mail-in or otherwise, and despite looking, Trump's 2016 campaign "could produce no hard evidence of systemic fraud," Ginsberg writes. Trump even put "the most vociferous hunters of Democratic election fraud" in charge of presidential commission on "election integrity," he notes, and "it disbanded without finding anything." Read Ginsberg's entire op-ed, including his warning for the GOP, at The Washington Post.