The phony election audit in Arizona has become like a virus infecting those with weak minds and bad intentions.
Enter the chair of the Nevada state Republican Party, Michael McDonald.
McDonald took a site visit to Arizona recently and came away proposing that Nevada hold one of these phony audits.
“Hats off to the leadership here in Arizona,” McDonald said in a video posted on Twitter. “I think that sets the model, sets the tone for Nevada. We want to be able to say the same thing in Nevada: that we looked at all the problems we had, all the anomalies that took place, to make sure that it was a clean and fair election.”
That’s not going to happen in Nevada, at least under current state leadership. Fortunately, Nevada law makes it clear that this kind of audit wouldn’t be legal here, and you can be assured that state and local officials would fight tooth and nail against the type of purely partisan and illegitimate action occurring in Arizona. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, for instance, reacted to McDonald’s video with a tweet saying his office defeated Trump’s lawsuits and would stand against “these so-called audits too.”
“Believe that,” he concluded emphatically.
McDonald obviously knows Nevada wouldn’t go for an Arizona-style audit, so it’s evident what he’s doing in suggesting the idea: He’s trying to gin up support in the future of this kind of insanity.
The Nevada state GOP already flirted with that by censuring Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske over false claims of widespread election fraud. Never mind that Cegavske is a stalwart of the state party and is the only Republican holding a statewide office. She wouldn’t drink the Trump cult’s Kool-Aid, so the extremists in the party lashed out at her.
This rabies infecting the weak-minded GOP is happening all over the country.
Matt Masterson, who helped lead the federal government’s election security preparations for 2020 as a former Department of Homeland Security official, put it this way to NPR: “Now we have a playbook out there where if you don’t like the results — by the way in an election that wasn’t particularly close ... you just claim you didn’t lose and in fact the process itself was rigged against you.”
Fortunately, there are some Nevada Republicans who are drawing a line, including Cegavske and leaders in the Clark County party. They understand that it’s up to the party to stop its own madness.
And to be clear, what’s happening in Arizona is insanity — workers searching for bamboo fibers in a pathetic attempt to prove the existence of illegal ballots from China, using UV lights to search for mythical watermarks in hopes of proving a QAnon theory, etc. Even Republicans in Arizona are sounding off about what’s happening there.
The whole exercise would be a joke if not for its potential ramifications, which include fueling GOP-led efforts to subvert the vote in Arizona and prompting copycat actions elsewhere.
Now McDonald and far-right radicals are trying to bring this sickness to Nevada.
That begs a question for another state GOP leader, former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, who is bidding to unseat Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in 2022. Mr. Laxalt, where are you on this? On which side of the GOP debate between crazy and sane do you fall?
Laxalt has been quiet after crowing early on about fraud and getting laughed out of the courts as former President Donald Trump’s Nevada point man on his junk legal campaign to subvert the election.
Nevadans deserve to know where Laxalt stands in this.
It’s bad enough that the audit is happening next door to Nevada. It’s far worse that forces within the state GOP want it to infect us.