A Las Vegas Republican announced this week he’s dropping legal efforts to purge thousands of Nevada voters before the November election.
Conservative consultant Chuck Muth wants courts to scrub citizens from the voter rolls in Washoe, Clark and Storey counties, as well as Carson City.
Muth says their names appear to match entries on a national change of address database. So he claims without evidence that mail ballots being sent to those voters could be filled out by someone else.
Now, Muth is dropping his lawsuits.
"We’re not giving up. But there were some technical objections that were raised."
One of those objections comes from the ACLU of Nevada, which joined the lawsuits on behalf of voters in Washoe and Clark counties.
Athar Haseebullah directs the legal nonprofit. He says Muth’s process of identifying voters who may have moved is deeply flawed.
"That database is not 100% accurate. All it does is show you what the, effectively, last known address is."
Haseebullah’s confident the judge would’ve rejected Muth’s argument.
But he also says that’s beside the point… because these lawsuits are part of a national plot to disenfranchise voters and further erode faith in elections.
Muth’s working with Cleta Mitchell, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who runs the Election Integrity Network. In 2020, she was a key player in trying to overturn former President Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden.
"So, it’s not anything that… we’re being directed by the Election Integrity Network to do this or that. It’s simply a matter of participating in the conference calls and learning what others are doing," Muth said.
As Muth was suing counties, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign filed election-related lawsuits of their own. They sued the state of Nevada four times, and judges dismissed all but one of those cases.
The final challenge is still pending, but with less than three weeks before the election, it’s unlikely to succeed.