U.S. Election: Trump goes to court

In a sign that the legal team for the Trump campaign is aggressively laying the groundwork for potential legal challenges, big and small lawyers have gone to state court in Nevada in an early vote dispute.

They are suing Joe P. Gloria, the Clark County registrar of voters, over a decision they allege he made to keep polling locations open “two hours beyond the designated closing time.”

The lawsuit targets polling places in the greater Las Vegas area that have larger minority voting precincts.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump(2nd R) and his wife Melania fill out their ballots at a polling station in a school during the 2016 presidential elections on November 8, 2016 in New York. / AFP PHOTO

Dan Kulin, a spokesperson for the county, told CNN that no early voting stations extended their closing times. They did, however, process voters who were in line at closing time to allow as many people to vote as possible.

In legal briefs filed Monday night, Trump lawyers are asking for an order to have the pertinent early vote ballots not to be “co-mingled or interspersed” with other ballots.

“From the polling, it appears that Nevada is so close that the Trump campaign thinks it’s worth challenging any violation in voting protocol.

The numbers that came in could represent several thousand people across the four precincts, which could determine who wins the electoral college vote or change the Senate race,” said Robert Lang of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

He said the Trump campaign is “smart to put a marker down for a future challenge, considering what happened in 2000 in Florida.”

Officials with the Republican National Committee declined to further discuss their action with reporters on a conference call early Tuesday afternoon.

In a statement, Charles Muñoz, Trump’s Nevada state director, said the developments on Friday night “should be troubling to anyone who is interested in free and fair election