Roy Moore files lawsuit challenging Alabama Senate result

Republican Roy Moore, who lost a recent Alabama Senate election to his Democrat rival Doug Jones, has filed a lawsuit challenging the result.

The lawsuit was filed about 14 hours before Thursday's meeting of state officials to officially declare Jones the winner. Jones defeated Moore by about 20,000 votes on December 12, the US media reported.

Moore was expected to win the election in the deeply conservative state, but his campaign was dogged by allegations of child sexual misconduct.

Moore and his campaign claimed that there were irregularities during the election and said there should be a fraud investigation and eventually a new election, CNN reported.

The election complaint alleged that out-of-state residents had been allowed to vote and that election fraud experts had concluded through statistical analyses that fraud had taken place.

One of the election experts Moore cited was Richard Charnin, who also posts about JFK conspiracy theories and the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.

Moore's complaint also alleged "anomalous" higher voter turnout in Jefferson County, in which census data shows 43 per cent of the population is black. He called the county's 47 per cent voter turnout as "highly unusual" and questioned the integrity of its election results.

Jones is the first Democrat in a generation to win a Senate seat in Alabama, beating Moore amid a firestorm of allegations that the GOP candidate had sexually abused teens.

In his complaint, Moore stated that he took a polygraph test over the sexual misconduct allegations made against him by Leigh Corfman, Beverly Nelson and Tina Johnson.

Moore said that he took the polygraph test after the election, according to his affidavit, included in the complaint.

In the affidavit, Moore stated: "The results of the examination reflected that I did not know, nor had I ever had any sexual contact with any of these individuals."

He called the allegations "false and malicious attacks".

--IANS

soni/dg