 "US President-elect Donald Trump. File Image/Reuters")
President-elect Trump filed a lawsuit on Monday against the Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer over a poll released just before Election Day, which showed Vice President Harris leading him by a significant margin in Iowa.
According to The Hill report, the poll indicated Harris had a 3-point lead in Iowa, just days before Trump went on to win the state by 14 points and secured his return to the White House.
Trump’s lawsuit, filed in Polk County, Iowa, accuses the newspaper and pollster of violating the state’s consumer fraud laws through deceptive practices, added the report.
The lawsuit was first reported by Fox News Digital.
“For too long, left-wing pollsters have attempted to influence electoral outcomes through manipulated polls that have unacceptable error rates and are not grounded in widely accepted polling methodologies,” The Hill quoted the lawsuit as saying.
“While Selzer is not the only pollster to engage in this corrupt practice, she had a huge platform and following and, thus, a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters,” the lawsuit added.
Trump has intensified his legal battles with the media, filing lawsuits against ABC, CBS, journalist Bob Woodward, and the Pulitzer Prize board.
At a press conference on Monday, the president-elect hinted at the lawsuit over the Iowa poll when he was asked about ABC News’s recent $15 million settlement in a defamation case Trump had filed earlier this year.
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More Shorts“In my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference,” The Hill quoted Trump as saying of the Iowa poll.
The lawsuit names Selzer, her polling company, the Des Moines Register and Gannett, the paper’s parent company, as defendants.
According to the report, Selzer declined to comment.
“We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer,” The Hill quoted Lark-Marie Anton, a Des Moines Register spokesperson, as saying in a statement.
“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit,” Anton added.
With inputs from agencies