Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano on Tuesday said the delayed results of the 2000 presidential election will look like “child’s play” compared to the legal battles that may arise this November.
Napolitano cited the legal disputes from 2000 between then-Republican nominee George W. Bush and his Democratic rival, Al Gore, as precedent for lawsuits related to election results, but said this year is shaping up to be much worse.
“It is normal for [presidential campaigns] to get their legal forces in order. We have the example, of course, in 2000 of Bush against Gore in which the legal forces were amassed after Election Day when it became apparent that the Florida count and recount would be disputed. That would seem like child’s play compared to what may be coming in November this year,” Napolitano, a senior judicial analyst for the network, told “Fox & Friends.”
“With the voting by mail, there is going to be a dispute over whether or not the signature on the document containing the ballot — you sign the envelope that you put the ballot in — whether that signature matches the voter signature registered with the voting officials. That’s what the dispute will be this year,” he added.
“As we speak, there are hundreds of lawyers who have agreed to stop their regular law practice for however long this takes and work for either [Biden] or the president because you need lawyers in each state to contest to the outcome first before election officials and then before judges in that state,” the former New Jersey Superior Court judge said.
Napolitano’s comments come as President Trump has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about mail-in voting, prompting Twitter to flag some of his tweets for “violating the Twitter Rules about civic and election integrity.”
An NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll last month found that 45 percent of voters said they are not confident that the election results will be tallied accurately. Four years ago, that percentage was 34 percent.
Trust in election results was sharply divided along party lines in the most recent survey, with just 36 percent of Republicans saying all votes would be counted accurately and 55 percent of Democrats saying the same.