President Donald Trump’s campaign said it would ramp up legal efforts to challenge vote counts in closely-contested states in the U.S. election on Thursday, and said it would file a lawsuit alleging voter fraud in Nevada, which is still counting ballots.
In Las Vegas, Trump allies alleged, without evidence, that there had been voting irregularities in populous Clark County, which includes the city. Democratic challenger Joe Biden has a small lead in Nevada.
“We believe that there are dead voters that have been counted. We are also confident that there are thousands of people whose votes have been counted that have moved out of Clark County during the pandemic,” former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, a Republican, told reporters.
He and other Trump campaign surrogates present, including former administration official Richard Grenell, gave no evidence to support their allegations and refused to answer questions from reporters.
Laxalt said a lawsuit would be filed in federal court to ask the judge to “stop the counting of improper votes.”
Bob Bauer, a senior advisor to Biden’s campaign, called the various Trump lawsuits “meritless” and designed to undermine the integrity of the electoral process.
“They’re intended to give the Trump campaign the opportunity to argue the vote count should stop. It is not going to stop,” he told reporters on Thursday.
Nevada is one of a handful of battleground states that could decide the presidency and has yet to be called after Tuesday’s vote.
Election legal experts have said Trump’s legal strategy is unlikely to have a decisive impact on the outcome of the election.
Trump has repeatedly said that he expects the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority including three justices he appointed, to have a key role.
But it is unlikely the court would have the final word in any decisive way and any challenge would have to make its way through the usual court process, legal experts say.
In Pennsylvania, where Trump is narrowly leading but Biden is making gains, the Trump campaign and other Republicans have already filed various legal challenges.
An appeals court in Pennsylvania on Thursday ordered that Trump campaign officials be allowed to more closely observe ballot processing in Philadelphia.
The campaign on Wednesday also filed lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia.
A judge dismissed the Georgia lawsuit on Thursday.
(Reporting by Steve Holland, Doina Chiacu, Tom Hals, Karen Freifeld, Julia Harte, Jan Wolfe and Lawrence Hurley; Writing by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Peter Graff, Sonya Hepinstall and Noeleen Walder)
