# Ben Ginsberg For four decades Ben Ginsberg was the Republican Party's premier election lawyer — the man the GOP sent into every recount, redistricting fight, and ballot dispute that mattered. Since 2020 he has become something rarer and more useful: the most credentialed insider witness against the party's election-denial project. When the lawyer who ran the Republican side of the 2000 Florida recount says there is no evidence of systemic voter fraud, the claim carries a weight no Democratic litigator can supply. He is the election-law counterpart to [[Michael Luttig]] on the bench and [[George Conway]] at the bar — conservatives whose defense of the machinery of democracy now runs through opposition to [[Donald Trump]]. ## The insider résumé A newspaper reporter for five years (Boston Globe, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin) before law school, Ginsberg spent 23 years as a partner at Patton Boggs and six at Jones Day (2014–2020), building the definitive Republican political-law practice. He served as counsel to the RNC and the party's campaign committees, and — per his own bio — to four of the last six Republican presidential nominees, including as national counsel to Bush-Cheney in 2000 and 2004 (where he was a central figure in the Florida recount and *Bush v. Gore*) and to Romney for President in 2008 and 2012. The résumé has a stain he owns: in 2004 he resigned from the Bush campaign after disclosure that he had simultaneously advised the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In 2013–14 he co-chaired President Obama's bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration with Democratic counterpart Bob Bauer — the "long lines" commission whose recommendations became the professional standard for election administration. ## The break In a series of Washington Post op-eds beginning in September 2020 — before the election — Ginsberg broke publicly with Trump's fraud narrative, writing that in decades of Republican poll-watching and litigation he had never seen evidence of the widespread fraud the party was alleging, and that the GOP was harming both democracy and itself by claiming elections are rigged. He has spent the years since as a systematic debunker of election-denial claims from inside the credential structure of the Republican legal world, including testimony and public commentary against the "independent state legislature" theory and Trump's attempts to seize administrative control of elections. ## Building the defense infrastructure In 2021 Ginsberg co-founded the [[Election Official Legal Defense Network]] with Bob Bauer — a bipartisan network connecting election officials facing threats, harassment, and retaliatory prosecution with pro bono counsel. It is the legal-profession answer to the intimidation campaign against election workers documented across this vault. His signature line on why: election officials "never get praised if elections go right and the wrath comes down on them if they do them wrong." He also serves on the bipartisan advisory board of the [[States United Democracy Center]]. ## Where he is now (2025–2026) Ginsberg is the Volker Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, a lecturer at Stanford Law School (where he has co-taught election law with Bauer), and a frequent broadcast commentator (CNN, PBS). Heading into the 2026 midterms he has been a go-to explainer of how pre-election litigation, redistricting wars, and pressure on election administration could complicate the cycle — see the [[2026 Midterms Hub]] for the fights he is narrating. His Hoover work in late 2025 marked the 25th anniversary of *Bush v. Gore* by arguing the country remains unprepared for another "100-year storm" contested election. ## Why he matters to the KB - **The credentialed defector.** Ginsberg's entire career was spent building Republican electoral advantage; his testimony against election denial cannot be dismissed as partisan. He is the type specimen of the insider-defector counterweight. - **Infrastructure, not just commentary.** EOLDN and the States United advisory role are durable institutions — the [[Legal Strategy as Movement Infrastructure]] pattern applied to defending election administration itself. - **The Elias mirror.** With [[Marc Elias]] he forms the bipartisan pole pair of contemporary election law: Elias litigates to expand voting access from the Democratic side; Ginsberg defends the legitimacy of the count from the Republican side. Their convergence on "the elections were not stolen" is the strongest available evidence that the denial project is fabricated. ## See also - [[Jurists and Legal Advocates]] — the resistance legal-ecosystem roster - [[Resistance Hub]] — the counterweight map - [[Preet Bharara]] · [[Joyce Vance]] — the prosecutor commentariat