Can a 72-page report convince Republicans who doubt the results of the 2020 election that former President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden?
That’s the hope of eight prominent conservatives, including former federal appeals judge Thomas B. Griffith, who today released “Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case That Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Election.”
The other authors are J. Michael Luttig and Michael W. McConnell, former Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, former Sens. John Danforth and Gordon H. Smith, longtime Republican election lawyer Benjamin L. Ginsberg and veteran Republican congressional chief of staff David Hoppe.
Collectively, they reviewed Trump’s claims of fraud and irregularities, as well as the reviews and audits conducted in six battleground states, and said that there is no question that Biden won, and that repeatedly saying otherwise “causes real harm to the basic foundations of the country.”
“We do not claim that election administration is perfect. Election fraud is a real thing; there are prosecutions in almost every election year, and no doubt some election fraud goes undetected. Nor do we disparage attempts to reduce fraud. States should continue to do what they can do to eliminate opportunities for election fraud and to punish it when it occurs,” the authors wrote.
“But there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.”
The authors call on conservatives to “cease obsessing” over the results and “to focus instead on presenting candidates and ideas that offer a positive vision for overcoming our current difficulties and bringing greater peace, prosperity, and liberty to our nation.”
The report focuses on the legal challenges of Trump and his supporters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Sixty-four court cases challenged the results in these states; only one was successful and it involved “far too few votes” to change the results, the report says.
Despite these unsuccessful challenges, numerous polls have found that roughly a third of Americans don’t trust the election results, and the number rises to more than two-thirds of Republicans.
The authors are hoping to use their conservative credentials to convince some of their fellow Republicans to accept the results. Each has worked in Republican politics, been appointed to office by Republicans, or in some other way are associated with the GOP. Several have worked as Republican poll workers or assisted in Election Day operations monitoring voting, the report says.
The report can be downloaded from the website Lostnotstolen.org.