Jurists who led George W. Bush to victory in 2000 expressed strong views on Donald Trump’s claims

Many of the key team members who helped hand over the presidency to George W. Bush after the Florida recount in 2000 They see no way for President Donald Trump to ignore the election won by President-elect Joe Biden.

Trump claimed to have won based on his early leadership in Pennsylvania and other disputed states. But that leadership vanished when the votes by mail were counted, so his campaign began filing more lawsuits to invalidate those votes. The campaign said it intends to seek a recount in Wisconsin and hopes to stop certifying the results in Pennsylvania and Michigan that would make Biden’s victory official.

But Several members of the Bush team in 2000 predict that this election will not be canceled, due to the breadth of Biden’s lead in various states and the lack of evidence on which to base the claims.

“You can’t just say, ‘This election is tainted, throw it away'”said Benjamin Ginsberg, national attorney for the Bush 2000 campaign. “You have to have some specificity and, so far, they lack a lot of specificity. Their plane crashed on take off because they forgot to add fuel ”.

Ted Olson, Bush’s lead attorney in the 2000 United States Supreme Court case that concluded the recount in Florida and granted him the presidency, said there was no doubt about the outcome.

“I think the elections are over”Olson said at a Federalist Society event last week. “We have a new president.”

Olson also wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post with David Boies, chief legal officer of the Al Gore Democrats in Bush v. Gore who went to the Supreme Court, saying that Trump’s campaign litigation “will only serve to delay the inevitable resolution of this year’s presidential election.”

Also Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist in 2000, said in an opinion piece for the Wall Street newspaper that Trump’s litigation to overthrow Biden’s leadership will not be successful because there is no evidence of systemic fraud that Trump needs to prove. And he said an ongoing tally in Georgia won’t change that state either.

“The president’s efforts are unlikely to pull a single state away from Biden’s column, and certainly not enough to change the bottom line,” Rove said.

Trump’s campaign and his supporters argued in the lawsuits filed in Pennsylvania and Michigan that Republican observers stayed too far from the ballot-counting process to see if there was any fraudulent activity. But courts are unlikely to reject votes based on minor irregularities that do not affect enough votes to alter the election results. And on Sunday, the Trump campaign withdrew the request that the court do so in Pennsylvania.

“If the court reversed this election on this basis, it would deprive many thousands of voters just because someone said there was a wrongdoing in a particular place,” said Barry Richard, Florida’s chief attorney in the 2000 tally case.

The Trump campaign is suing to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying the results under the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution, which was at the heart of Bush v. Gore. Republicans argue that largely Democratic counties allowed voters to correct mistakes in their ballot papers and Republican counties did not. But the Florida case was different because it required votes to be counted differently by different counties, Richard says.

In recent days, Republicans’ lawsuits for alleged voting irregularities have failed, including the one in Arizona from which the Trump campaign has drifted away since last Friday. The courts have also rejected attempts to discard some votes, such as 8,329 ballots in Philadelphia with flaws such as a voter’s inability to print their name.

Some conservative commentators continue to hold out in the hope that the Trump campaign demands in one or more states needed to shift Biden’s leadership in the Electoral College may still reach the US Supreme Court to decide the race, as in 2000.

But that case revolved around the count in Florida after the contest narrowed to just one state. Y the margin was only 537 votes, close enough to require the recount that produced the dispute. Now, Biden leads by tens of thousands of votes in some states.

The idea of ​​the Supreme Court taking action this year to influence the election is an illusion, says Ginsberg.

“With the paucity of evidence that has been presented so far, it’s nowhere near realistic,” ensures.

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