Donald Trump is still refusing to concede the election. He's claiming the election was "rigged" and was rife with fraud perpetrated by Democrats. And he has filed numerous lawsuits to try and overturn the election results so he can stay in the White House for another four years. Most of those lawsuits have been tossed out of court, because they have not offered any evidence of their claims of fraud.
Some on the right are trying to justify the lawsuits by comparing them to the Bush vs. Gore court fight in the 2000 election. But that was a much different matter. And the two attorneys from that lawsuit -- David Boies (for Gore) and Theodore Olson (for Bush) -- say their suit was not the same as Trump's frivolous lawsuits. They say the 2020 election is over.
Twenty years ago, we represented the opposing sides in Bush v. Gore. We still don’t agree about how the Supreme Court ruled, but we completely agree that nothing in that case — or in the Supreme Court’s decision — supports the challenges now being thrown about in an attempt to undermine President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Yet, over the past week, we have heard repeated assertions that the outcome of this election is somehow in doubt, as it was in 2000.
It is not. Biden will be president. There are many areas of policy on which we disagree. But no matter how you voted in this election, that is the clear outcome. The nation’s laws and shared values dictate that Americans now unite to support democracy, national security, the public trust in institutions and the urgent work of the next administration.
It is also important for the public to understand why 2020 bears no resemblance to 2000.
The presidential-election controversies currently playing out in various parts of the country are not repeats of Bush v. Gore
That case involved the agonizingly close election in a single state, Florida, the outcome of which was to be decisive in the election for president that year. A mere 500 or so votes separated candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore. The Supreme Court ultimately concluded that there were separate and conflicting vote-counting standards in different parts of Florida that violated the Constitution. The justices halted a late Florida Supreme Court order for a statewide recount. . . .
It is clear to us, and by now to most Americans, that former vice president Biden won, including in the six states central to the challenges being mounted by President Trump’s lawyers.
The margins in those six states range from 10,000 votes in Arizona to more than 145,000 votes in Michigan. Evidence of systemic or widespread fraud or miscounting in those states has simply not been found, and recounts rarely, if ever, change the outcome of elections by more than a few hundred votes.
Trump would have to overturn the outcome in more than one of those states to change what is apparent as the clear result of the election. It is time to accept that Biden won the election and it is time to accept that result and come together as a nation. . . .
Past losers of presidential elections, however stinging their defeats, have ultimately decided to make peace with the opposing camp. Former vice president Gore did so, admirably, when Bush v. Gore was resolved. The sooner that Trump and his supporters accept the election result, the better it will be for the nation.
