Nevada’s not alone
Election chaos is in the offing in Nevada where election deniers are driving out election professionals, Dana Milbank writes:
The election supervisors in 10 of the state’s 17 counties have already quit, been forced out or announced their departures. Lower-level election workers have quit in the face of consistent abuse. The state’s elections staff has lost eight of its 12 employees.
The (Republican) secretary of state, who vigorously defends the integrity of the 2020 election, is term-limited, and the GOP nominee to replace her, Jim Marchant, leads a national group of election deniers running for office. Marchant is on record saying that if he and his fellow candidates are elected, “we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again.”
He seems nice.
In Reno’s Washoe County, the state’s second largest, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist led a harassment campaign against the registrar of voters, accusing her of treason and addiction, and she quit in fear for her family’s safety. In her absence, the county recently mailed a sample ballot to voters laced with errors: a missing contest, a missing candidate, a contest that didn’t belong on the ballot and a misspelling.
It’s deniers all the way down.
Perhaps a dozen races in November could be contested amid chaos and conspiracy-a-go-go. Under Nevada law Milbank links to, the legislature could step into any fouled-up race from Assembly up to governor and appoint whomever members choose.
Your vote. Their choice.
Stone knives and bear skins
A few Nevada counties, meanwhile, are in the process of sabotaging their vote-counting procedures. After Marchant traveled the state making presentations with false allegations of voting machine fraud, at least four counties have taken steps toward abandoning voting machines and running elections by paper ballot and hand counting — a process certain to delay results and introduce more errors.
The furthest along in this return to the 19th century is Nye County, a rural stretch of desert where Donald Trump won 69 percent of the vote in 2020. After Marchant urged the county commission to “dispose of your electronic voting and tabulation machines,” it moved toward doing just that. The longtime county clerk, a Republican, resigned in frustration, and the commission appointed as clerk Mark Kampf, who has touted various election conspiracies and is now seeking election on the same ballot he is administering.
(Did you read the gentleman’s name as Mein Kampf too?)
Early voting begins today even as Kampf’s 18-page draft election plan is being edited. Ginny Okawa, chair of Nye County Indivisible and a volunteer poll worker, expects “a circus.” Training and staffing is in disarray.
Kampf gave Milbank the name of his lawyer when Milbank finally caught him leaving his office. The lawyer wouldn’t comment either. Marchant insists it is instead “forces” trying to “hide” something.
Hannah Fried, who runs the voting rights group All Voting Is Local, sees what’s happening in Nevada as part of a proliferation nationwide of “efforts to create chaos in our election system in service of undermining election results.”
Georgia has had mass challenges to voter registrations, Florida has a new police force that has engaged in voter intimidation, Michigan is battling rogue election workers, and many states have experienced harassment of elections officials, restrictions on voting drop boxes, and more. “It’s death by a thousand cuts,” Fried said. The push for paper balloting, because it will extend the vote-counting time and thereby potentially undermine confidence in the process, “is a tinderbox.”
First it’s charges of voter fraud. Then voter registration challenges. Then ditching machine counts and election deniers in charge. Then when hand counts result in chaos, it’s legislatures choosing leaders for you.
After that it’s a strongman.