BEN GINSBERG: Echoes of Gore’s Florida Recount in Griffin’s Attempt to Toss Ballots

Raleigh, NC – In case you missed it, RightCount partnered with long-time Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg to draft and place an op-ed in The Carolina Journal slamming Jefferson Griffin’s attempt to invalidate the votes belonging to more than 600,000 North Carolinians in the 2024 Supreme Court race. Ginsberg, who practiced election law for more than four decades and served as counsel for George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, outlines the striking similarities between Griffin’s efforts and what Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore sought to accomplish in Florida following the 2000 presidential election.

Echoes of Gore’s Florida Recount in Griffin’s Attempt to Toss Ballots
March 31, 2025

Jefferson Griffin’s attempts to invalidate 60,000 North Carolina voters bear haunting parallels to what Al Gore supporters tried to do late in the 2000 Florida recount to take away George W. Bush’s victory. I was the Bush-Cheney campaign’s national counsel, and as Republicans, we were outraged by the unprincipled attempts to disenfranchise voters to steal a win.

Imitating the Gore playbook, Griffin is trying to overturn a historically close election by changing the election’s rules after it was conducted and disenfranchising thousands of otherwise legal voters, not because they did anything wrong, but because of election officials’ instructions.

Griffin’s efforts should fail for the same reasons Al Gore’s did. In 2000, the US Supreme Court recognized that changing the rules fundamentally violates the rule of law. And not even the highly partisan Florida Supreme Court could swallow disqualifying otherwise legal voters to swing an election.

As a Republican election lawyer for 40 years, I’m for Republicans winning judicial elections. But not like this. Not when Griffin has not identified any fraudulent voters or ballots not cast in compliance with official election guidance. And not when Griffin has to ask his fellow judges to abandon principle to achieve his own electoral success. He lost a heartbreakingly close race. It happens. But it is wrong to disqualify voters who may have voted against you because of administrators’ perceived errors.

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Gore supporters tried to disenfranchise nearly 25,000 absentee ballots in heavily Republican Seminole and Martin counties late in the recount on grounds of administrators’ errors. Our brief — co-signed by current US Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett — noted: “It is the will of the voters that is paramount and in the absence of any evidence — or even any allegation — that fraud thwarted the voters’ will, the result of the election must stand.”

Like Florida, it’s important what Griffin is alleging and what he’s not. He argues that the State Board of Election’s improper rulings allowed ineligible voters to cast ballots, including by overseas voters who were not required to show photo ID and by US citizens who have never lived in the country.

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Griffin’s challenge, just like the failed Gore 2000 effort, has been unable to identify any individual who cast a ballot is actually ineligible, that any ballot was altered or that any ballot reflects anything other than the will of the voter.

As a result, he’s left with administrators’ error, an argument North Carolina courts have rejected in the past, just as the Florida courts did in 2000.

This has led to some awkward moments for his supporters. In a News and Observer interview, GOP Chair Jason Simmons could not say: that any ineligible voter voted; why granting Griffin’s remedy would not invalidate other races on the ballot, including Republican wins; whether their “principled” voter integrity efforts would have included litigating if Griffin had won; why the GOP waited a decade until this election to challenge the “Never Residents” law; why the GOP never challenged military and overseas voters’ ID requirements until this election; and why Griffin only challenged voters in primarily Democratic counties if “election integrity” was the true goal.

It should be embarrassing for Judge Jefferson Griffin to make — and ask his fellow judges to buy — his arguments to disenfranchise legal voters, especially members of our military. Ambitious candidates may not always stick to principles, but judges must. As in Florida 2000, such an attack on the rule of law must be rejected.

Read the full op-ed, click here.

RightCount is a 501(c)(3) entity that conducts research and educates fellow citizens around election integrity issues. To learn more about RightCount’s mission in Pennsylvania and the steps it is taking to protect the integrity of the 2024 general election, please visit rightcount/org/Pennsylvania.

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