The campaign of President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Tuesday evening challenging Nevada’s newly passed Assembly Bill 4 (AB4) expanding mail-in voting access to all eligible voters, claiming the measure “upends Nevada’s election laws and requires massive changes in election procedures and processes, makes voter fraud and other ineligible voting inevitable.” The campaign was joined in the action by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which said it had a “vital interest in protecting the ability of Republican voters to cast, and Republican candidates to receive, effective votes in Nevada elections and elsewhere.”
The complaint, filed Tuesday evening in the U.S. District Court in Nevada against Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske (R), seeks to have a federal judge block the law from being enforced. The legal challenge comes just the day after the president erroneously accused Nevada’s Democratic governor Steve Sisolak of unlawfully seizing power in a “late night coup.” Trump also promised to see Sisolak in court.
Sisolak signed AB4 Monday during special session of the state’s legislature. The law specifies that Nevada election officials will send all active registered voters a mail-in ballot if there is a statewide emergency or disaster directive, such as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The lawsuit claims that the implementation of universal mail-in voting will effectively extend the deadline of the 2020 presidential election beyond that mandated by the U.S. Constitution because of a provision that permits ballots with unclear postmark dates to be counted if they are received by 5:00 p.m. three days after.
“The electoral process cannot function properly if it lacks integrity and results in chaos,” the complaint stated. “Put simply, the American people must be able to trust that the result is the product of a free and fair election.”
The law’s provisions setting forth the number of in-person polling places were also challenged as violating the Equal Protections Clause because it forces the number of voting locations to correlate with a county’s population.
“Under those sections, the number of in-person voting places a county must establish is tied to the county’s population, resulting in more in-person voting places per capita for voters in urban counties than in rural counties. This disparate treatment of Nevada voters based on county population violates rural voters’ rights under the Equal Protection Clause,” the complaint stated.
President Trump on Monday continued his attack on Nevada’s law, alleging the state lacked the infrastructure to properly conduct its election through the mail.
“Nevada has ZERO infrastructure for Mail-In Voting,” Trump tweeted. “It will be a corrupt disaster if not ended by the Courts,” he wrote in an early morning tweet. “It will take months, or years, to figure out. Florida has built a great infrastructure, over years, with two great Republican Governors. Florida, send in your Ballots!”
Elections experts promptly responded:
Read the full lawsuit below:
Trump Nevada Lawsuit-AB4 by Law&Crime on Scribd
[image via NICHOLAS KAMM_AFP via Getty Images]
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
Follow Law&Crime:
