aNewDomain — At an emergency hearing Tuesday morning in Nevada, a judge denied Donald Trump’s requests to separate some Las Vegas voters’ ballots from others in the county. The Donald Trump Nevada lawsuit alleges those votes were illegal because voting officials allowed them in after early voting polls closed.
Nevada law requires that people who are already waiting in line when polls close must still be able to cast their ballots. But Trump claims people who were not in line in four Las Vegas locations were nonetheless allowed to vote.
Clark County officials deny the allegations.
At the hearing this morning, Eighth Judicial District Court Judge Gloria Sturman sounded exasperated at the Trump side’s request.
“What are you saying? Why are we here? You want to preserve the poll data? That is offensive to me,” the judge said. Why don’t we wait to see if the secretary of state wants to do this?”
In the suit, readable below, Trump’s lawyers claim Clark County registrar Joe Gloria rigged the vote: “The Registrar’s violations were not random and neutral in their effect, but very much appear to be intentionally coordinated with Democratic activists in order to skew the vote unlawfully in favor of Democratic candidates,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit.
Trump opponents say the allegations in the suit are driven by the desire to suppress ballots cast by Latinos, who make up 30 percent of Clark County’s population and overwhelmingly support Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.
According to news reports last week, Nevada experienced a record-breaking Latino turnout in early voting.
At a Trump rally in Reno over the weekend,
Nevada GOP chairman Michael McDonald claimed Clark County “kept a poll open “until 10 o’clock at night so a certain group could vote.”
Trump followed up by telling supporters “it’s being reported that certain key Democratic polling locations in Clark County were kept for hours and hours beyond closing time to bus and bring and [SIC] Democratic voters in.”
Judge Sturman denied Trump’s motion, this morning, which demanded that officials not “co-mingle or intersperse” the votes in question with other ballots.
“You have no cause of action,” she said.
To Trump lawyers’ arguments that elections officials should release the personal information of poll workers who worked at the Las Vegas polling places in question, the judge gave another firm ‘no.’ She was unwilling to risk the harassment of these public servants, she said, adding that the idea that the information could be released to the thousands of pro-Trump “trolls on Twitter,” she said, “is disturbing to me.”
The suit is readable in full, below.
For aNewDomain, I’m Gina Smith.
Donald Trump Nevada Lawsuit by Gina Smith on Scribd
Cover image of Las Vegas voters: ReviewJournal.com, All Rights Reserved; Clark County voting image: CBSNews.com, All Rights Reserved.
