Trump accuses the Des Moines Register newspaper of “interfering with the election” in a lawsuit

Trump has sued a polling company and newspaper for allegedly engaging in “brazen election interference” after a pre-election study.

The president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, has sued a polling company and a newspaper for allegedly engaging in “brazen election interference” by publishing a pre-election survey that understated his support.

The lawsuit, which was submitted late Monday, alleges that pollster Ann Selzer, The Des Moines Register, and its parent company Gannett purposefully minimized Trump’s popularity in a poll that showed him lagging behind Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

In Iowa, where Trump had won the state by large margins in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, the poll released on November 2 that showed Harris trailing him by three percentage points garnered a lot of attention.

Trump won Iowa in the most recent presidential contest by a margin of more than 13 percentage points.

According to the lawsuit, Selzer made a purposeful polling error in Polk County, Iowa. According to Trump, “She knew exactly what she was doing.” Based on allegations of violations of Iowa’s consumer fraud legislation, the lawsuit seeks quadruple the damages that a jury has found to be appropriate.

The case was dismissed as unfounded by Lark-Marie Anton, a spokeswoman for The Des Moines Register, who defended the newspaper’s reporting.

By releasing the poll’s complete demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, and a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer, Anton said, “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.

A request for comment was not immediately answered, but pollster Ann Selzer told PBS last week that she was perplexed by the idea that the poll had been set up to yield a particular result.

Trump recently reached a settlement with ABC News in a defamation dispute involving anchor George Stephanopoulos’s untrue assertion that he had been found civilly responsible for rape.

Trump’s lawsuit was denounced by the civil liberties organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression as a violation of the First Amendment, which protects the right to free expression.

The First Amendment rights of all media outlets are at risk if newspapers and polling companies are sued for “deceptive practices” because they publish stories and polling data that politicians find objectionable. According to the group, “it is not election fraud or interference to get a poll wrong.”

Given the strong speech protections in the US, Trump, who is also suing CBS News over an interview with Harris that he alleges was deceptively edited, faces formidable legal obstacles.

Because they require depositions from journalists and executives and expose internal conversations, these cases might still make things more difficult for news organizations.