Trump Lawyer: Campaign Wasn’t ‘Allowed a Forensic Audit’ of Nevada Voting Machines

A Clark County election worker scans mail-in ballots at the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas, on Nov. 7, 2020. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

One of President Donald Trump’s election lawyers told senators that their team’s efforts in Nevada to obtain evidence to file lawsuits were met with denials from relevant election officials.

“Paper [ballot] backups that were supposed to provide such transparency” weren’t given to the team, lawyer Jesse Binnall told the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Dec. 16. Binnall said that across the “entire state of Nevada,” there was “zero transparency” from election officials.

What’s more, he said, Trump’s lawyers were “denied any meaningful discovery in the case to examine the full extent of the voter fraud” that allegedly occurred in the state, including their investigations into whether 4,000 non-U.S. citizens voted. The suit also alleged that more than 60,000 people voted twice or weren’t residents of Nevada.

On Dec. 4, Judge James Russell rejected the campaign’s lawsuit.

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.”

State election officials declared they saw no evidence of voter fraud or irregularities in Nevada that would overturn the result of the election in the state, which has six Electoral College votes.

But in the hearing, Binnall said that Trump’s campaign didn’t have enough time to obtain evidence, as per the judge’s ruling.

“We couldn’t put that into evidence because the court ruled that it was too late,” the lawyer noted on Dec. 16, saying they only had about “three days” to procure evidence of irregularities or fraud.

As they probed the alleged irregularities, Binnall said they were also refused access by state election officials to the code of voting machines for a forensic review or whether “they were hooked up to the internet,“ while accusing the state of ”denying transparency.”

“We weren’t allowed near them ... we weren’t allowed a forensic audit.”

The state election officials, he argued, told Trump’s team that the voting machine software code “is proprietary,” meaning it isn’t open source due to intellectual property rights. Binnall, however, flagged this explanation as problematic as these machines aided in vote counting.

“We were denied [transparency] at every single turn” in Nevada, he said, adding that one Nevada official “locked himself in his office” and wouldn’t open the door when Trump’s lawyers tried to serve him a subpoena.

According to a sworn affidavit that cited Nevada DMV records, some 3,987 non-U.S. citizens voted in the state on Nov. 3. In Nevada, both illegal and legal noncitizens can obtain drivers’ licenses or ID cards. It’s illegal for non-citizens to vote in U.S. elections.

Officials at the Nevada Secretary of State’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment following Binnall’s remarks.