A Republican candidate for secretary of state in Nevada has vowed that he and other like-minded lawmakers will “fix” election rules all over the U.S. in order to ensure former President Donald Trump gets reinstated into the White House in 2024.
Appearing onstage with Trump during a rally in the state on Saturday, Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee for the position, said he and other Republican secretaries of state across the country would take actions to ensure Trump becomes president in two years’ time.
“When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024,” Marchant said.
According to reporting from Vice, “fixing” the country entails doing away with a number of popular and important aspects of elections — including ending mail-in ballots, getting rid of vote tabulation machines, and requiring all Nevadans in the state to re-register to vote.
Marchant’s “coalition” of like-minded Republicans refers to his “coalition of America First secretary of state candidates,” which he formed after losing a congressional election in the state in 2020. Although he claims that election fraud was responsible for his loss — much like Trump did that year in several states across the U.S. — Marchant’s claims have never been substantiated, and a court dismissed his claims of fraud following his attempts to have the election re-run.
No evidence of widespread fraud affecting any election in 2020 has ever been documented, either in Nevada or anywhere else in the U.S.
In spite of his claims, Marchant is viewed as the front-runner in this race — meaning he is more likely to become Nevada’s next secretary of state, in charge of overseeing all elections in the state.
Democratic insiders in Nevada say not enough people in the state are even aware that the race is happening.
“Marchant can’t be trusted, but I just don’t think a lot of people are even paying attention to the race. We’ve been knocking on doors, and people aren’t aware of the race,” said Donna West, a former state Democratic Party official. “They still don’t understand what the secretary of state does.”
Far from being atypical, Marchant represents what a majority of Republicans running for federal or major state offices purport to believe about the 2020 election. According to a recent analysis from The Washington Post, 299 Republican candidates running for those offices say they do not believe in the validity of the last presidential election, or have at least questioned the results.
Most of those candidates are running in “safe” races — meaning they are currently expected to win their elections, and bring their errant viewpoints to the offices they are vying to represent.
Several Republican candidates are also setting up the possibility that they won’t accept their own election results, much like Trump did prior to Election Day 2020. In a separate Washington Post analysis, 12 out of 19 GOP candidates running in close senatorial or gubernatorial races refused to say whether they’d recognize the outcome, if they do end up losing.
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