President-elect Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against renowned pollster J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for a poll released three days before the election showing Vice President Kamala Harris with a lead in the state. 

Trump alleged in the lawsuit that the poll amounted to election interference and that the poll was manipulated to favor Democrats. The suit argues that Selzer’s polling miss is fraud under Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act. 

The lawsuit comes days after Trump settled a defamation lawsuit with ABC News over comments by anchor George Stephanopoulos during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C. 

Trump has also sued CBS News for allegedly manipulating an interview with Harris on “60 Minutes,” saying the news company intentionally made her look coherent. 

The Nov. 2 Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll had Harris up by three points over Trump in the deep red state. Trump won the state by 13 percentage points, a 16-point deviation from the poll, and his largest margin yet. 

The register and Selzer, who has since retired, have examined the poll to attempt to find out what went wrong, but have yet to find a conclusive answer. 

Lark-Marie Anton, a Des Moines Register spokeswoman, said the newspaper acknowledged the poll didn’t meet the final election results and released the data and a technical explanation for transparency, according to the Associated Press. 

“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit,” she said.

The lawsuit filed by Alan Ostergen, a conservative activist and lawyer, alleges that the pollster intentionally interfered with the polling results to give Democrats a boost in the state and divert Republican resources away from battleground states. 

“There was a perfectly good reason nobody ‘saw this coming’: because a three-point lead for Harris in deep-red Iowa was not reality, it was election-interfering fiction,” Ostergen wrote. “The Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election.” 

Selzer told Iowa PBS during a Friday taping of “Iowa Press” that she did not manufacture the poll and it was against her ethics to do so. 

“To suggest without a single shred of evidence that I was in cahoots with somebody, I was being paid by somebody, it’s all just kind of, it’s hard to pay too much attention to it except that they are accusing me of a crime,” she told Iowa PBS.