Leftover court bid to block Biden win in Nevada is dismissed

Tue, Jan 12, 2021 (3:10 p.m.)

A leftover legal bid by a conservative former state lawmaker to block certification of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden's win in Nevada has been dismissed.

Joel Hansen, an attorney representing former state Assemblywoman Sharron Angle and her Election Integrity Project of Nevada, acknowledged Tuesday that their election challenge asserting President Donald Trump won the state has become moot.

“What good would it do to go forward?” Hansen said.

By agreement, Hansen and apposing attorneys for the state let the case die and absorbed their own legal costs.

Deputy Nevada Solicitor General Gregory Zunino declined to comment about the written order issued by Clark County District Court Judge Gloria Sturman just ahead of a scheduled Tuesday hearing in the case.

The state Democratic party did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

The judge’s order does not block Angle and her watchdog group from mounting another court effort based on the same allegations.

Sturman in November rejected Hansen's claims of widespread election irregularities, saying she was not willing to throw out 1.4 million statewide votes based on unproven allegations of voter fraud.

Biden won in Nevada by about 2.4%, or more than 33,000 votes.

Hansen insisted he had boxes full of accounts of illegalities collected by project volunteers who knocked on doors in the Reno and Las Vegas areas. He projected that up to 8,000 people who should not have voted had cast ballots.

Angle’s lawsuit was one of several election-related cases filed in state and federal courts in Nevada before and after the election. Two remain alive on the court docket, but without court dates scheduled.

Republican state Assemblyman Jim Marchant sought to have Sturman removed from hearing his bid for a do-over of Democratic U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford’s reelection by about 33,000 votes in a huge congressional district that includes a slice of Clark County, the state’s most populous and Democratic-leaning area.

Another Republican, Dan Rodimer, got his case transferred from Sturman to a different judge who rejected it on on jurisdictional grounds. Rodimer had claimed voter fraud and ballot-counting irregularities led to his loss to Democratic U.S. Rep. Susie Lee by about 3% of the 417,000 votes tallied in their Clark County district.

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