EDITORIAL: Nevada Republicans go on the record refusing to criminalize election fraud [Las Vegas Sun]

Las Vegas Sun (NV)

May 26—To understand the eagerness within the Nevada Republican Party to disfigure democracy, residents of the Silver State need look no further than Tuesday's party-line vote in the state Senate on Senate Bill 133, or its near-party-line vote in the Assembly last month.

The bill makes it a crime to create, conspire to create or knowingly serve on a false slate of presidential electors. It also prohibits local governments from employing those convicted of illegally conspiring to steal an election from serving in roles where they might use their position to commit fraud in future elections.

SB 133 should have received unanimous support. After all, elected officials of all political stripes should want to prevent election fraud. This is especially true of Republican legislators, who have spent years screaming about election integrity.

Yet now, when given the opportunity to vote on a bill that actually criminalizes the act of trying to steal an election via fake electors, the entire Republican caucus voted against the bill.

Of course, we shouldn't be too surprised. Michael McDonald, the chairman of the Nevada Republican Party, was the ringleader of a conspiracy to use fake electors to help overturn the results of the 2020 election and give Donald Trump a second term in the White House.

McDonald was so committed to overthrowing the will of the people that he even signed a document certifying that his hand-picked slate were "duly elected and qualified electors."

Moreover, testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol showed that McDonald knew his actions violated state statutes specifying the process for becoming a "duly elected and qualified elector." But McDonald and his partisan allies on the right didn't care. They didn't have to care. Their lie was so brazen, outlandish and unprecedented that no criminal code had actually considered a criminal prohibition on such a conspiracy.

As state Sen. Skip Daly, D-Reno, testified in a committee hearing on SB 133 earlier this year, "We don't have any measure that actually prohibits that, per se."

With dozens of election deniers serving in the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, there is nothing standing in the way of Nevada GOP officials simply claiming a victory in the 2024 election cycle, regardless of the ballots cast or the voters' will.

Thus, the need for SB 133.

Yet it bears repeating: Every single Republican legislator in Nevada voted against the bill. Every single Republican who swore an oath to defend the constitution and uphold the laws of the state of Nevada voted to allow hucksters to ignore Nevada statutes and overthrow the right of the people to vote for their elected officials. Every single Nevada GOP legislator voted to weaken democracy as we know it. They won't defend the same democratic process that placed them in the seats they now occupy.

This isn't rhetoric. Nor is it hypothetical. Unlike McDonald's fake electors, this was a real vote taken on a real bill by real elected officials in our state's legislative chambers.

Fortunately for Nevadans, Democratic majorities in each chamber voted to pass the bill. But if Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo follows his party's lead and vetoes the bill, the Democrats do not have enough votes to overturn the veto. Even if they did, it's not clear the party is united against this type of election manipulation. In the state Senate, two Democrats, James Ohrenschall and Melanie Scheible, joined with Republicans and voted against the bill.

If Democrats fail to garner the votes needed to override a veto of SB 133 by Lombardo, McDonald and the other Trump lackeys who pervade the GOP could immediately return to scheming methods to overturn the results of the 2024 election, knowing that they will face no consequences.

Perhaps more importantly, it would send the message that GOP legislators in this state care so little for the integrity of our elections that even when we know the tactics that election fraudsters are going to use, we still won't stop them.

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