Evan Vucci / AP
President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at the White House, Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Washington.
Monday, Aug. 10, 2020 | 3:13 p.m.
Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, has filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump’s campaign to stop the state from mailing ballots to all active voters in the November election.
The motion, written by Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford, says the argument over mail-in ballots is a policy debate, not a legal debate.
“Because the complaint presents a policy debate, the debate should be carried out in a non-judicial forum, allowing the secretary to use critical public resources to ensure a free and fair 2020 election, rather than be consumed by partisan discord,” the motion says.
The decision to mail ballots to active voters for the general election was made during the most recent legislative special session, led by Democratic lawmakers.
Trump stated his intention to challenge the law soon after its passage, posting on Twitter that it should be met with “immediate litigation.”
Other Republican Party officials, such as Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, followed suit in criticizing the law.
McDaniel called it an opening to “create more opportunities for fraud and allow ballot harvesting.”
That statement prompted state Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro, D-Las Vegas, to call McDaniel a “partisan hack” using the pandemic to “suppress Nevadans’ right to vote.”
Trump’s campaign, along with the state GOP and the National Republican Committee, filed suit Tuesday, a day after the bill was signed by Gov. Steve Sisolak.
The introduction to the lawsuit says the electoral process cannot be trusted “if it lacks integrity and results in chaos.” It says that the bill’s ramifications would impact election integrity.
Trump and some of his campaign staff have made false statements about the bill’s impact, including that it would allow voters to cast their ballots after the election, which is not true.
The bill does not do away with in-person voting entirely but sets a number of live and early voting sites in each county based on population.
Clark County will have at least 100 live voting sites and at least 35 early voting sites.
Some national Republicans, including Trump, have raised the specter of voter fraud. There is no evidence, however, that mail-in ballots lead to any substantial voter fraud.
Voter fraud in the U.S. is rare, with the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice finding in 2017 that the rate of voter fraud was somewhere between 0.00004% and 0.0009%. Most incidents are traceable to clerical errors or bad data matching, the center said.
Cegavske told legislators during the special session that there were no cases of voter fraud during the June primary election, which was held almost entirely by mail in Nevada.
Cegavske’s motion comes days after the Nevada Democratic Party, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit. The motion called Republican arguments a “hodgepodge of claims, none of them viable,” and said mail-in ballots would increase voter protection in the election.
