Donald Trump's junk challenge to the large early vote among Latinos in Nevada has been shot down by an incredulous—and pissed off—judge. The campaign was asking "for ballots and voting machines to be 'set aside, sequestered, and impounded' from four early voting locations"
A little before noon, local time, on Tuesday, Judge Gloria J. Sturman denied the request, after a hearing.
At the hearing, she expressed significant, repeated skepticism of almost every aspect of the lawsuit—from the campaign’s standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place to the question of whether other relevant parties like the secretary of state had appropriate notice to the remedy the campaign was seeking.
“You’ve failed to exhaust [your] administrative remedies,” she said, noting that the Trump campaign should have first asked the secretary of state to address the campaign’s concerns.
Sturman also expressed significant concern about whether an order in the Trump campaign’s favor would lead to poll workers being harassed — after what she has seen from “trolls” on Twitter.
“I am not going to expose people doing their civic duty to help people vote … to public attention, ridicule, and harassment,” she said. “I’m not going to do it.”
And she didn't. The campaign rushed to court without having done their due diligence, they didn't go to the Secretary of State before coming to her, they did this all wrong. They wasted the court's time. She stopped short of holding them in contempt (or using her gavel on the Trump attorney, which some of us might have be sorely tempted to do). Watch her in action below the fold.
This might be a preview of what's to come from the Trump camp as things fail to go their way at the ballot box today. It's probably not the only suit they'll bring, and Trump is more likely to go to court rather than concede. But if all the suits are a ineptly handled as this one, he'll be an even bigger laughingstock than he already is.
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