GOP election lawyer: Republicans have "no proof of widespread fraud"

GOP lawyer Ben Ginsburg, who practiced election law for 38 years and co-chaired the bipartisan 2013 Presidential Commission on Election Administration, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Wednesday that "after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud."

The big picture: Trump has argued with little evidence that mail-in voting is susceptible to fraud, claiming that the only way he will lose the 2020 election is if it's "rigged." Ginsburg wrote that the "lack of evidence renders these claims unsustainable."

• The president drew backlash last week for calling on voters who are concerned about their ballots being counted to vote twice — once in mail and once in person.
• State officials warned that doing so would constitute a felony.

What they're saying: "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," Ginsburg wrote.

• "The president’s actions — urging his followers to commit an illegal act and seeking to undermine confidence in the credibility of election results — are doubly wrong."
• "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."

Ginsburg continues: "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."
• "Republicans need to take a hard look before advocating laws that actually do limit the franchise of otherwise qualified voters. Calling elections “fraudulent” and results “rigged” with almost nonexistent evidence is antithetical to being the “rule of law” party."

His bottom line: "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."

Read the full op-ed.