Republican Challenge to Nevada’s Mail-in-Ballot Law Gets Tossed

The Republican National Committee, Donald J. Trump for President 2024, Inc., and individual Republican voters don’t have standing to challenge a Nevada law that allows ballots mailed before an election to be counted if they arrive up to four days after the vote, a federal court said.

The plaintiffs said that the law violates the federal law that establishes Election Day, the right to stand for office, and the right to vote. But Judge Miranda M. Du of the US District Court for the District of Nevada never looked at the merits of the claims. Instead, she said that the plaintiffs failed to show that she had jurisdiction over the case.

The organizational plaintiffs’ argument that they had organizational standing to bring the suit was rejected by Du because any possible injury they would suffer hinged on the unfettered choices of third-party voters and was purely speculative. They also failed to show that any harm to their electoral prospects would likely be redressed by enjoining Nevada from counting ballots received after election day, the judge said.

Nor did the plaintiffs show that Nevada’s election law forces them to compete under a state-imposed disadvantage, Du said. “Any ‘advantage’ that Democrats may gain from the four-day grace period is one that appears to be equally available to, but simply less often employed by, Republicans,” she said.

The organizational plaintiffs also failed to show that the Nevada law frustrates their mission and causes them to divert resources in response to that frustration, Du said. Any diversion of resources caused by the law, including chasing ballots—collecting them—appears to be nothing more than “business as usual,” she said.

Possible vote dilution also didn’t support the plaintiffs’ standing, Du said. “The Trump Campaign cannot establish associational standing on behalf of Nevada voters because the Campaign does not allege that it has any members who live or vote in Nevada,” she said.

The RNC and Nevada GOP also failed to prove associational standing, because their individual members lack standing, Du said. Vote dilution has been repeatedly rejected by federal courts “as an insufficient injury in fact to support standing when the alleged harm is predicated upon the counting of illegitimate or otherwise invalid ballots and equally affects all voters in a state,” she said.

Ashcraft & Barr LLP, Consovoy McCarthy PLLC, Chattah Law Group, Dhillon Law Group Inc., and Michael A Columbo, of San Francisco, represented the plaintiffs. The Washoe County District Attorney’s Office, the Clark County District Attorney’s Office, and the Nevada Attorney General’s Office represented the state.

The case is Republican Nat’l Comm. v. Burgess, 2024 BL 243685, D. Nev., No. 3:24-cv-00198-MMD-CLB, 7/17/24.