Trump can't just ask the Supreme Court to stop ballot counting, GOP election lawyer tells CNN

President Trump early Wednesday said he thinks he won the presidential race, prematurely claimed victory in states that still have millions of votes uncounted, and said he will ask the Supreme Court to halt the vote count — or stop the "voting," as he said. Officials in Pennsylvania and other states that won't finish counting votes for hours or days vowed that every ballot will be counted. And legal experts said Trump can't really just petition the Supreme Court to halt the counting of legally cast votes.

Ben Ginsberg, who spent decades as a top Republican Party election lawyer, told CNN's Jake Tapper early Wednesday that even if Trump did have a mechanism to petition an end to the vote counting or toss out votes, that request would "be viewed by any court, including the Supreme Court, as just a massive disenfranchisement that would be frowned upon."

Tapper asked Ginsberg, who was national counsel to George W. Bush's campaign in the Florida recount, if he had seen anything like Trump's statement. "No, not even close," he said. Ginsberg retired over the summer, then started criticizing Trump's constant and baseless claims of voter fraud.

Trump's "unsubstantiated talk about 'rigged' elections caused by absentee ballot 'fraud' and 'cheating' has been around since 2016," Ginsberg wrote in The Washington Post last week. But "this is not about finding fraud and irregularities. It's about suppressing the number of votes not cast for Trump." CBS News estimates that there are five million legally cast votes left to be counted in the five uncalled swing states.

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