Election lawsuits fly in Nevada ahead of vote certification

LAS VEGAS — Election-related lawsuits flew Tuesday in Nevada, where a voting watchdog group organized by a conservative Nevada activist claimed fraud and asked a judge to nullify the Nov. 3 statewide election and two Republicans who lost Las Vegas-area races to Democrats went to court to demand re-votes.

In a promised fourth action, the state Republican Party said it would file a new lawsuit "to throw out fraud and ensure election integrity in the Nevada general election."

Donald Trump Nevada campaign co-chairman Adam Laxalt and American Conservative Union chief Matt Schlapp scheduled an afternoon news conference to describe that effort.

The legal filings came after Clark County commissioners on Monday accepted the results of the election in the Las Vegas area, where more than 977,000 votes were tallied. Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria acknowledged 936 "discrepancies" among votes countywide. Gloria said officials identified six people who voted twice.

Discrepancies ranged from inadvertently canceled votes, reactivated voter cards and check-in errors at polling places, he said.

President Donald Trump tweeted the results amounted to "large scale voter discrepancy," and that Clark County officials did not have confidence in their election security.

The state Supreme Court is scheduled next Tuesday to certify the election as complete.

Two lawsuits filed Monday in state court in Las Vegas seek fast-track action to invalidate the election on behalf of GOP candidates Jim Marchant, who lost a bid for Congress by nearly 5% to incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford, and April Becker, who lost a state legislative race by less than 1% to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro.

Attorney Craig Mueller, representing Marchant and Becker, did not immediately respond to messages. His court filings allege that universal mail voting left Clark County awash with "un-trackable" ballots and the use of an optical scanning machine to approve ballot signatures violated state law that the lawsuit maintains requires humans to validate votes.

A statement on behalf of Clark County and Gloria noted that similar arguments in recent weeks in federal and state court cases failed to convince judges to stop the count of mailed ballots.

"The complaints ... misstate and misrepresent evidence," county spokesman Dan Kulin said in the statement, "and parrot erroneous allegations made by partisans without first-hand knowledge of the facts."

Another case filed Monday makes explicit claims of voter fraud in a bid to block statewide certification of the election.

It asks a state court judge who refused in September to block the mailing of ballots to every active registered voter in the state to now issue an injunction to prevent the Nevada secretary of state from certifying that Democratic candidate Joe Biden won a more than 33,000-vote statewide victory over Trump.

"We think the election has been stolen here and in many other states," Joel Hansen, the attorney handling the case for Sharron Angle and her Election Integrity Project of Nevada, said Tuesday.

Hansen alleged "widespread fraud," and said the group collected evidence that 1,411 people who moved from Nevada to California registered to vote in California and then voted in Nevada.

Angle, of Reno, is a former Republican state lawmaker who made an unsuccessful run 2010 against Democrat Harry Reid for his U.S. Senate seat from Nevada.

In a court document dated Monday, Angle said members of her group visited the addresses of 8,027 voters in the Reno and Las Vegas areas listed as not having voted since 2010. The court filing provides eight self-described "incident statements" about people who didn't live at those locations.

The new court cases came with two other active lawsuits pending in Nevada relating to the election.

A public records case in state court is expected on Friday to provide to the Trump campaign and the state GOP information about more than 300 people who were hired to count ballots in Clark County.

A federal court action filed Nov. 5 by a count-watcher, a voter and two Republican congressional candidates alleges ineligible votes were cast in the Las Vegas area. That case remains pending in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, with written filings deadlines set but no hearing scheduled.