A Nevada court judge denied a request Tuesday from Donald Trump campaign lawyers to issue an order directing a county registrar of voters to preserve and separate ballots from voting machines in four early voting sites in Clark County, Nevada. In legal briefs filed Monday night, Trump lawyers had asked for an order to have the pertinent early vote ballots not to be “co-mingled or interspersed” with other ballots after the campaign alleged the county registrar kept polling locations open beyond their designated hours. Judge Gloria Sturman, of the District Court for Clark County Nevada, ruled from the bench, saying County Registrar of Voters Joe P. Gloria was already obligated by state law to maintain the records that the Trump campaign is seeking. The judge at times expressed frustration with Brian Hardy, a lawyer for the Trump campaign. “I am not ordering him (Gloria) to preserve anything,” she said, adding, “This is Election Day. He has other things to be doing.” The Trump campaign had said Gloria kept polling locations open “two hours beyond the designated closing time.” The lawsuit targeted polling places in the greater Las Vegas area that have larger minority voting precincts. Dan Kulin, a spokesperson for the county, told CNN that no early voting stations extended their closing times. They did, however, process voters who were in line at closing time to allow as many people to vote as possible. “From the polling, it appears that Nevada is so close that the Trump campaign thinks it’s worth challenging any violation in voting protocol. The numbers that came in could represent several thousand people across the four precincts, which could determine who wins the electoral college vote or change the Senate race,” said Robert Lang of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He said the Trump campaign is “smart to put a marker down for a future challenge, considering what happened in 2000 in Florida.” Officials with the Republican National Committee declined to further discuss their action with reporters on a conference call early Tuesday afternoon. In a statement earlier Tuesday, Charles Muñoz, Trump’s Nevada state director, said that the the developments “should be troubling to anyone who is interested in free and fair elections.” The registrar’s office said in a statement that the Trump campaign’s request to preserve the records “is required by state law, and so it is something we are already doing.” Clark County, which includes the suburbs of Las Vegas, has a large Hispanic population and could figure prominently in who wins the White House. Agencies
