Nevada Judge Dismisses Trump Request for Poll Worker Names in Early-Voting Dispute
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Reno, Nevada on Saturday. John Locher / AP Photo
Las Vegas-area elections officials let early voters already in line cast their ballots after deadline, to the Republican campaign’s frustration.
A judge in Clark County, Nevada, denied an Election Day request from the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to preserve ballots and poll worker names from four early voting sites around Las Vegas, citing election “anomalies”.
Long early-voting lines at a market and several shopping centers on Friday prompted elections officials to allow voters already in line after the 7 p.m. deadline to cast their ballots.
Trump’s Nevada campaign director, Charles Munoz, called the concession an “egregious violation of election law,” according to The Associated Press.
“[M]ost, if not all, of our early voting locations had lines of voters when their scheduled closing time passed,” said county spokesman Dan Kulin, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “As has been our practice for many, many years, those early voting locations continued processing voters until the lines were gone.”
At least one voter at a southeast precinct cast their ballot after 10 p.m., officials said, according to the AP.
As the Los Angeles Times reports about the Trump campaign’s requests:
District Judge Gloria Sturman was unimpressed by the lawsuit it filed alleging improprieties in early voting around Las Vegas. She rejected the campaign’s request to preserve particular records—saying county officials were already required by law to preserve most of them. And then she excoriated Trump’s attorneys for seeking the names of paid and volunteer poll workers.
"I am not going to expose people doing their civic duty to help their fellow citizens vote ... to public attention, ridicule and harassment," Sturman said, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal.
A spokesman for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Glen Caplin, called the lawsuit a “frivolous attempt to disenfranchise voters” amid record turnout in Nevada and nationally.
Dave Nyczepir is a News Editor at Government Executive’s Route Fifty and is based in Washington D.C.
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