Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Clark County, Nevada over an early-polling place that allegedly remained open two hours past its stated closing time on Friday. The campaign claims that people should not have been allowed to vote after the location closed on the final night of early voting, but, as in many states, people who were already in line after the polls closed were allowed in to fill out their ballots. His campaign takes reported issue with others who were allowed to vote despite the fact that they were not in line when the location closed. Trump and Nevada GOP chairman Michael McDonald called the location, which was in a 30-percent Hispanic neighborhood in Las Vegas, was kept open improperly. Trump said it was evidence of a "rigged system." A spokesman for the county, Dan Kulin, told NBC News that the location acted properly and that under Nevada law, everyone who was in line at the time the poll was scheduled to close—7 p.m. local time—was entitled to cast their ballot. The last vote was cast just before 10 p.m. local time. "Nothing happened that wasn't supposed to happen," Kulin said. "Voters who were in line by the scheduled closing time were allowed to vote."
The Trump campaign asked for all voting machines and ballots involved in the disagreement to be set aside instead of counted. During an 11 a.m. hearing, Clark County judge Gloria Sturman tore into Trump’s lawyers and then threw out the challenge. “Are [the votes] not to be counted?” she asked. “What are you saying? Why are we here? You want to preserve the poll data? That is offensive to me. Why don’t we wait to see if the secretary of state wants to do this?” She added, “I'm not going to expose people doing their civic duty helping their fellow citizens vote, that they are taking their personal time to preserve… to public attention, ridicule, and harassment.”