Nevada judge shoots down Trump polling place lawsuit: 'I am not ordering anything'

A Nevada judge sparred with a lawyer for the Trump campaign on Tuesday over the campaign's request that the state preserve information about who was working at polling places that stayed open late to accommodate voters last Friday.

Officials in Nevada kept a polling place open until 10 p.m. local time on Friday - three hours later than scheduled - to allow all of the people that had lined up to vote.

The Trump campaign alleged in the lawsuit filed on Tuesday that voting registrar Joe Gloria's actions in Clark County "very much appear to have been intentionally coordinated with Democratic activists."

Nevada law stipulates that every person in line when the polls close must be able to vote.

David Lee, a lawyer with the Trump campaign, asked Clark County Judge Gloria Sturman in court on Tuesday to compel Gloria to "preserve" the names of the poll workers who allowed the late voting to happen.

Sturman was incredulous: "I don't get what you're asking" me to do, she told Lee, noting that the names of the employees working that day were already required by law to be preserved.

"I can't obligate [Gloria] to do something he's already obligated to do," Sturman said. "This is Election Day. He has other things to be doing."

Lee shot back that the names of the workers need to be preserved so that the Trump campaign has recourse to later "identify who the individuals were so that we can discuss with them what actually went down."

"We need to interview them, talk to them," Lee said. "That's part of the process of discovery."

Sturman remained skeptical.

"It's disturbing to me to think that those individuals might be harassed," she told Lee. "I am not going to expose people doing their civic duty to help their fellow citizens vote to public attention, ridicule, and harassment."

Lee responded that they wouldn't be harassed, but Sturman noted that what the Trump campaign was asking for, essentially, was to preserve the polling workers' names in a public record so that they could be accessed later.

"Do you watch Twitter? Have you watched any cable news show?" Sturman asked, implying that were these workers' names made public, they'd be subjected to harassment online and on TV.

"Those people have privacy interests," she said. "And they're not here to defend themselves."

The Trump campaign's Election Day lawsuit against Gloria also claims that the votes from after 7 p.m. on Friday in Clark County shouldn't be "co-mingled" with other votes. The Trump campaign requested that ballots from specific locations be sequestered to see whether a particular voter got in line at a specific time.

Sturman said she was "really bothered" by that request as well, and asked the counsel for Clark County, Mary Miller, if that was even possible.

Miller responded that it was not, because "under the US system, those votes are secret."

"Voting machines are all ready to use today, on Election Day, so we can't segregate those," Miller added. "And everything else they've asked for is already mandated by law to be preserved."

Sturman, ultimately, was firm in her decision.

"I am not going to issue any order," she told Lee. "I'm not going to do it."