Judge throws out challenge to Bush victory in Nevada
By SCOTT SONNER
ASSOCIATED PRESS   30 November 2004

RENO, Nev. (AP) - A legal challenge aimed at blocking Nevada's five electoral votes from being cast next month for President Bush was tossed out Tuesday.

Washoe County District Judge Peter Breen granted a motion to dismiss the case brought against Nevada's five Republican electors.

The plaintiffs, who described themselves as concerned citizens, had asked the judge to schedule a hearing so they could prove their claims of voter registration fraud and malfunctioning voting machines.

Breen said they couldn't show the outcome of the presidential election would change if the case went forward.

"An election contest is a great disruption of the regular process," Breen wrote in a six-page ruling.

"The election should not be disturbed nor scrutinized by the court without a reasonable showing of a different outcome or an uncertain result," he said.

Bush carried Nevada by 21,500 votes and won the electoral vote nationally by a margin of 34 electoral votes, 286-252.

Breen acknowledged that registration fraud and voting machine malfunctions could have had some effect on Nevada vote totals.

However, he said that does not mean the election would have turned out differently or the results rendered uncertain.

"No election was more carefully watched nor more hard fought in this court's memory than the 2004 presidential election. Sen. Kerry has long ago conceded the election and our country is moving forward to deal with the issues that still remain in another arena," Breen wrote.

"We must deal with what happened rather than what might have been," he said.

It was not immediately clear if the ruling would be appealed. The GOP electors argued that the challenge was moot because the Nevada Supreme Court formally canvassed the vote last week and Secretary of State Dean Heller, a Republican, certified the results.

"The train has left the station and the results could not possibly change," said Rew Goodenow, a lawyer representing the five GOP electors scheduled to cast Nevada's votes Dec. 13.

"The winner in this election has been declared under the laws of the state of Nevada," he told Breen during a 2 1/2-hour hearing Monday.

"Elections have one endearing and wonderful quality - the quality of finality. At some point the election has to be final. This one is, and the court ought not meddle with that," Goodenow said.

Jeff Dickerson, a Reno lawyer representing a bipartisan group contesting the election results, said Monday that even if Nevada's electoral votes don't change the outcome of the national election "it does make a difference to Nevada."

"President Bush is claiming he has a mandate and included in that is that the state of Nevada stood behind him. Even if Nevada's five electoral votes will not change the election, it does have an impact on whether Nevada is part of that mandate," Dickerson said.

`If there are disenfranchised voters who were illegally disenfranchised ... then those voters are not having their will voiced," he said.

The group making the challenge said it was not a Democratic Party or pro-Kerry effort.

Minden resident Rick Newell Davis who recently changed his registration to Republican filed the formal contest of the election results earlier this month. He said thousands of Nevadans might have been denied the right to vote Nov. 2 because of registration problems and should still be allowed to cast ballots.

Davis said many Nevadans were disenfranchised by a voter registration organization financed by the Republican National Committee.

Some former workers for Voter Outreach of America, operated by Sproul and Associates of Phoenix, who registered voters in Nevada and other battleground states said they were told to register only Republicans and to ignore pro-Kerry people. Some said completed Democratic registration forms were thrown out or ripped up.

The head of the company, Nathan Sproul - a former Christian Coalition activist and one-time executive director of the Arizona GOP - has denied wrongdoing.

Bush won 418,690 votes in Nevada (50.5 percent) to Kerry's 397,190 (47.9 percent). Both major parties determine their electors at state conventions, and the winning party's electors are bound by state law to cast electoral votes for the candidate who carried Nevada.