Judge rejects Trump campaign lawsuit seeking to block state’s presidential election results
Submitted by admin on Fri, 12/04/2020 - 3:59pm
President Donald Trump’s legal effort to overturn presidential results in Nevada has fallen short after a Carson City District Court judge rejected his team’s request to award the state’s six electoral votes to the incumbent.
Judge James Russell ruled Friday against the Trump campaign’s unprecedented request to either block certification of the state’s presidential election results or award the state’s electoral votes to Trump, saying in a written order that the campaign’s claims of voter fraud to the level needed to bring the state’s presidential results into question fell far short of the evidentiary standard needed to contest the results of the presidential election.
In his 35-page order, Russell wrote that he found the evidence offered by the Trump campaign to have “little to no value,” and failed to provide under any standard of proof that the campaign’s long list of alleged fraud and vote irregularities could be backed up under any evidentiary standard.
“Contestants did not prove under any standard of proof that any illegal votes were cast and counted, or legal votes were not counted at all, for any other improper or illegal reason, nor in an amount equal to or greater than 33,596, or otherwise in an amount sufficient to raise reasonable doubt as to the outcome of the election,” Russell wrote in the order. “Reasonable doubt is one based on reason, not mere possibility.”
Election results certified by the state Supreme Court last week gave former Vice President Joe Biden a 33,596-vote lead over Trump in Nevada. The state’s six electors and all electors nationwide are scheduled to meet on Dec. 14 to cast official ballots for president and vice president.
An appeal is likely to be filed immediately — Russell asked attorneys on both sides Thursday to prepare draft orders by 10 a.m. on Friday, in order to have enough time to file an appeal with the state Supreme Court before the weekend.
But the lawsuit’s initial defeat is the latest in a string of post-election losses for the Trump campaign and Republican in Nevada, who have filed a flurry of unsuccessful legal efforts seeking either new elections or a halt to certification of the state’s election results, over a myriad of unsupported claims of massive voter fraud. At least five other election challenges filed after the election by losing Republican candidates or affiliated organizations have been rejected outright at the District Court level.
In its lawsuit filed mid-November and during a court hearing on Thursday, attorneys for the Trump campaign claimed that they had evidence that the election was “stolen” from the president, pointing to a handful of anonymous declarations alleging wrongdoing and data analysis that they claimed indicated tens of thousands of nonresidents voted in the 2020 election.
But nearly all evidence cited by the campaign — save for the initial complaint and a brief data analysis report published after the Thursday hearing — were filed under seal, meaning that records such as depositions or lists of alleged ineligible voters are not publicly available.
Attorneys representing the Democratic Party-selected slate of electors (named as defendants in the lawsuit) said Thursday that the evidence provided was flimsy at best, and failed to provide the specific evidence generally required for election results to be called into question, instead relying on what one attorney said was “nothing more than speculation, conspiracy theories and a fundamental misunderstanding of the electoral process.”
To read the judgement click here.
— This story is used with permission of The Nevada Independent. Go here for updates to this and other stories.
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