Group Statement on the 2020 Election

A statement signed by multiple VC contributors calling on Donald Trump and the Republican Party to accept the election result and stop promoting unsubstantiated accusations of fraud.

On behalf of myself and several other Volokh Conspiracy contributors, I would like to post the following statement on President Trump's refusal to recognize the result of the presidential election.

I should also take this opportunity to note that readers should be cautious in drawing conclusions about the views of those VC bloggers who did not sign the letter. Some might have chosen not to sign because of a general opposition to signing group statements, because they believe they don't know enough about the factual disputes behind the various claims of fraud,  or for other reasons unrelated to views on the substance of the issues covered.

Here is the statement:

We write as a group of conservative and libertarian legal scholars specializing in constitutional law and related fields. We voted for different candidates in the recent election, and a number of us voted for Republican candidates for Congress and other offices.

We call on President Donald Trump and the Republican Party to recognize that he has lost the 2020 election and to stop promoting unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about alleged voter fraud. The President's lawsuits seeking to overturn election results have been repeatedly rejected by state and federal courts, and  there is no basis for believing that fraud occurred on anything like the massive scale necessary to call the results into question.

Our constitutional system relies on American citizens and their representatives being honest with themselves and with each other. The President's account of the election is false, and those who continue to promote it are undermining constitutional democracy and sowing the seeds of needless future distrust and conflict. Those elected officials who privately reject the president's account, but have kept quiet so far, should say so, rather than promoting further uncertainty among their constituents by their silence.

Michael Abramowicz
Oppenheim Professor of Law
George Washington University

Jonathan H. Adler
Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law
Case Western Reserve University School of Law

David E. Bernstein
University Professor
Antonin Scalia Law School
George Mason University

Dale Carpenter
Judge William Hawley Atwell Chair of Constitutional Law and Professor of Law
SMU Dedman School of Law

Irina D. Manta
Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center for Intellectual Property Law (CIPL)
Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University

Orin S. Kerr
Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley School of Law

David G.Post
Professor of Law (ret.)
Temple University Law School

Stephen E. Sachs
Colin W. Brown Professor
Duke University School of Law

Ilya Somin
Professor of Law
Antonin Scalia Law School
George Mason University

Alexander "Sasha" Volokh
Associate Professor of Law
Emory Law School

Titles and institutional affiliations listed for identification purposes only.

UPDATE: We have added additional signers since this statement was first posted.