A North Dakota county election official is suing the state’s election director to block the counting of mail-in ballots received after Election Day in a lawsuit filed by a conservative group that also brought lawsuits amid former President Donald Trump‘s false claims of election fraud in 2020.
An election law expert says the Public Interest Legal Foundation appeared to be “court-shopping” for a conservative circuit with its case, which seeks an injunction against the election director for enforcing the state’s laws.
Burleigh County Auditor Mark Splonskowski, who was elected last fall, alleges he “is harmed by instructions to accept and cast ballots received after Election Day,” and that “because federal and state law conflict on the day the ballots must be turned in, he faces an impossibility in enforcing the law,” according to a complaint filed Wednesday in federal court.
“Despite federal law assigning one day as Election Day, North Dakota law allows ballots to arrive and be counted up to 13 days after Election Day,” the complaint states….
University of California Los Angeles law professor and election law expert Rick Hasen in an interview said the lawsuit is “kind of a roundabout way of attacking not having full results on Election Day, so it very much ties into Trump’s unsupported claims about the (2020) election.”
Splonskowski said in an interview the lawsuit has nothing to do with 2020. He said the foundation reached out to him “and told me that there were some concerns” about North Dakota’s law.
“What I am trying to do is be proactive and trying to ensure that future elections are as secure as possible and try to do anything I can proactively to ensure that our elections are secure and bolster public confidence in our election system,” he told The Associated Press.
“I think that so long as a state is intending to accept ballots that have been cast by Election Day that it likely does not violate federal law to count ballots that arrive after Election Day, but I’m not aware of any court that has squarely addressed the issue,” Hasen said.