Nevada Republicans’ nominee to be the state’s next top election officials thinks Donald Trump won the 2020 election and says he would not have certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state, even though the Democrat won with more than a 2% margin.
The GOP secretary of state nominee, Jim Marchant, a former state assembly member, lost by an even worse margin in his 2020 bid for the U.S. House of Representatives — nearly 5% — but nonetheless sued to overturn the results, and still claims to be a “victim of election fraud.”
The candidate — who told an audience in February that “Your vote hasn’t counted for decades” — called his primary win a “historic night on the road for election integrity.”
Marchant was on hand for the signing of a slate of fake Trump electors in 2020, and later told The Guardian that he would support another slate of presidential electors contrary to the actual presidential election results in 2024: “That is very possible, yes,” Marchant said.
Asked who he thought was manipulating voting machines, Marchant told the paper, “I don’t know actually. I think it’s a global thing.” Many of the judges who rejected election fraud claims, he added, were “bought off too — they are part of this cabal.”
Marchant, whose campaign website opens with a video of him approaching the viewer with a shotgun, states that his “number one priority will be to overhaul the fraudulent election system in Nevada.” And he succeeded on the county level during his campaign, convincing Nye County’s leadership to move toward abandoning voting machines altogether.
The newly minted nominee, who won with a 38% plurality of the vote, is a founding member of the so-called “America First” secretary of state coalition, full of candidates who, just like him, would have opted to subvert democracy in 2020 and could well actually do so once in power. The coalition’s website lists as policy priorities “aggressive voter roll clean-up” and eliminating mail-in and early voting.
That slate has freely mingled with QAnon conspiracy theorists and Big Lie entrepreneurs like ex-Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who’ve helped fund the effort.
Marchant told Steve Bannon this month, “If we get just a few of the candidates that we have in our coalition, we save our country.” t
And the effort has met with some success so far: Members of the coalition who’ve won primaries include New Mexico secretary of state candidate Audrey Trujillo (R) and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano (R) — who, as governor, would have the power to appoint a secretary of state. Michigan secretary of state nominee Kristina Karamo (R) won the endorsement of Michigan’s Republican Party at its convention in April and will appear on November’s general election ballot against incumbent Democrat Jocelyn Benson.
Nevada’s current secretary of state, Barbara Cegavske, was term limited, having been first elected in 2014. Cegavske, a Republican, stood up for the integrity of Nevada’s election results and was subsequently censured by her party in April last year for “claiming, without investigating, that this election was error free.”
Democrat Cisco Aguilar, a former Harry Reid staffer who served as Nevada Athletic Commission, ran unopposed and will face off against Marchant in November.
