Nevada shows how dangerous the election deniers are nationally. We have to stop them

Campaign Action

FiveThirtyEight delves into what’s happening in one of those states, Nevada. So far, the attrition rate there among county elections officials has been minimal—12 of the 15 incumbent county clerks don’t have opposition in the general election (the two other counties, Clark and Washoe, have appointed registrars of elections). One, Carson City’s Clerk-Recorder Aubrey Rowlatt served just one term—unfortunately, it included 2020—and she’s retiring. The 2020 election was so “emotionally charged,” she told the Nevada Independent that she was too burned out to face another. The candidates vying to replace here both told FiveThirtyEight that they believe the 2020 election was valid.

But not all the incumbents in Nevada are the good guys. For example, in Nye County where incumbent Clerk Sandra Merlino has been essentially forced out. She retired this summer after county commissioners voted to recommend that the county change to paper ballots that are hand-counted, despite her defense of the elections system in place. Merlino was replaced by an acting clerk, Mark Kampf, an election denier. Storey County Clerk-Treasurer Vanessa Stephens also resigned early this year, replaced by Jim Hindle, who was one of the fake “alternate electors” in Trump’s coup scheme. He’s running unopposed.

County commissioners in Elko and Lincoln counties are trying to get rid of the elections systems there, and in both Nye County and Esmerelda counties, they’ve succeeded in getting rid of the existing systems in favor of hand-counted paper ballots.

That would be a fine thing if it came with the funding for the personnel it would require to do that counting in a timely and accurate way—if there were safeguards to make it work. In another county, Lander, commissioners spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace its Dominion voting system with an ES&S system, simply because of the conspiracy theory that Dominion stole Trump votes.

David Damore, a political science professor at the University of Nevada told FiveThirtyEight that, while this election hasn’t yet been entirely adulterated by the deniers, the future threat is real. “Election administration is now a partisan issue whereas in the past it was just government doing government business,” Damore said.

That’s playing out all over the country, but particularly in battleground states—the states Trump fought so hard in with his dozens of failed lawsuits—and others. That includes Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Michigan, Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

That’s why Daily Kos has endorsed 17 Democratic candidates for attorney general, secretary of state, and state supreme court across eight crucial states—to guard against the building threat of these Big Lie proponents who would steal the 2024 election. The single most powerful thing we can do to stop Trump from stealing 2024 is to elect these Democrats to key positions downballot this year.

Please donate $1 to each of these Daily Kos-endorsed Democrats for attorney general, secretary of state, and state supreme court to stop MAGA election deniers from stealing the 2024 election.