President Donald Trump’s campaign attorney claimed at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that Nevada’s election was fraught with voter fraud.
“This year thousands upon thousands of Nevada voters had their voices canceled out by election fraud and invalid ballots,” said Trump campaign attorney Jesse Binnall, who filed a lawsuit challenging thousands of ballots in the Silver State before a judge rejected it on Dec. 4.
“Here is how it happened. On August 3rd, 2020, after a rushed special session, Nevada legislators made drastic changes to the state’s election law by adopting a bill known as AB4,” he said, referring to the state law that relaxed restrictions on mail-in ballots.
“The vulnerabilities of this statute were obvious. It provided for universal mail voting without sufficient safeguards to authenticate voters or ensure the fundamental requirement that only one ballot was sent to each legally qualified voter,” he told the Homeland Security panel. “This was aggravated by election officials’ failure to clean known deficiencies in their voter rolls.”
“Because of AB4, the number of mail ballots rocketed from about 70,000 in 2016 to over 690,000 this year. The election was inevitably riddled with fraud and our hotline never stopped ringing.”
Binnall further argued that due to the high number of mail-in ballots, it invited fraud and other irregularities.
A sworn affidavit cited by Trump’s campaign earlier this month said that more than 3,900 non-U.S. citizens voted in Nevada during the Nov. 3 election. The affidavit used information from Nevada’s DMV records. In the state, illegal aliens and legal non-citizens can obtain driver’s licenses and ID cards, although neither group can legally vote. The campaign also highlighted other alleged instances where voters cast ballots twice or non-Nevada residents casting ballots in the state.
Judge James Russell denied the campaign’s lawsuit on Dec. 4.
Russell wrote in his order that the Trump campaign “did not prove under any standard of proof that any illegal votes were cast and counted, or legal votes were not counted at all, for any other improper or illegal reason, nor in an amount equal to or greater than 33,596, or otherwise in an amount sufficient to raise reasonable doubt as to the outcome of the election.”
Earlier in the hearing, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said that the current legal challenges to the election results “undermine the will of the people, disenfranchise voters, and sew the seeds of mistrust.” He then accused Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), the Homeland Security panel chairman, of hosting a forum to peddle “conspiracy theories.”
