That’s why it’s very significant that the most famous Republican election lawyer in the country, Ben Ginsberg, has penned a Washington Post op-ed trashing the Trump/GOP strategy of fighting inconvenient votes and voters via made-up allegations of fraud. He begins with quite the dig:Legions of Republican lawyers have searched in vain over four decades for fraudulent double voting. 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.
After recounting Trump’s infamous advice to voters to deal with mail-ballot problems by voting in person as well, Ginsberg cuts to the chase:The president’s words make his and the Republican Party’s rhetoric look less like sincere concern — and more like transactional hypocrisy designed to provide an electoral advantage. And they come as Republicans trying to make their cases in courts must deal with the basic truth that four decades of dedicated investigation have produced only isolated incidents of election fraud.
These are painful conclusions for me to reach. Before retiring from law practice last month, I spent 38 years in the GOP’s legal trenches. I was part of the 1990s redistricting that ended 40 years of Democratic control and brought 30 years of GOP successes in Congress and state legislatures. I played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount and several dozen Senate, House and state contests. I served as counsel to all three Republican national party committees and represented four of the past six Republican presidential nominees (including, through my law firm, Trump 2020).
And in his most powerful admission, Ginsberg suggests he was as vigilant about what Republicans like to call “ballot security” as any of them:Each Election Day since 1984, I’ve been in precincts looking for voting violations, or in Washington helping run the nationwide GOP Election Day operations, overseeing the thousands of Republican lawyers and operatives each election on alert for voting fraud. In every election, Republicans have been in polling places and vote tabulation centers. Republican lawyers in every state have been able to examine mail-in/absentee ballot programs.
But he acknowledges that “after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud.”