Nevada election
Observers are expressing increasing alarm over links between Jim Marchant, the Republican Nevada secretary of state candidate, and the radical conspiracy group QAnon, which calls for political violence in America as it circulates wild claims about the nation.
While Marchant once denied involvement with the group, he now admits to working closely with a prominent QAnon figure to recruit candidates for top election positions who will promise to overturn election results they don’t like.
Last fall in Las Vegas, Marchant was included as a featured speaker at a four-day QAnon conspiracy theory event. At the time, he went on record with the Sun claiming he wasn’t a follower of the far-right political group whose extreme members’ beliefs include former President Donald Trump is a messiah sent by God who will someday publicly execute his opponents and that Democrats run a national cabal of pedophiles who also cannibalize children.
Now as multiple reports have surfaced regarding Marchant’s involvement with QAnon, the candidate has made conflicting statements about the timeline of his involvement with a central QAnon figure. This much is certain: Now that he is the candidate for the GOP and the primary is behind him, Marchant no longer denies coordinating with Juan O Savin, a leading figure in QAnon.
At the time of the 2021 event, Marchant claimed he could not support the QAnon conspiracies because he did not know what QAnon was.
Marchant said he spoke at the conference because wanted to promote his campaign, which is based on false claims of election irregularities, including his unproven assertion that he “was a victim of election fraud” in a 16,000-vote loss in 2020 to U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev.
“Nobody can tell me what it (QAnon) is,” he told the Sun for an Oct. 21, 2021, article. The people who were putting on the event couldn’t even tell him what QAnon was, he said.
Despite Marchant’s claims of ignorance about QAnon, recent reporting links him closely to central figures evangelizing for QAnon. Marchant is relying on the group’s help as he seeks to defeat Democrat Cisco Aguilar in the race to become the state’s highest elections officer.
However, Marchant has done more than seeking help from the group, he now admits he has been actively involved with some QAnon leaders according to various reports, some relying on a video of the event.
During the QAnon heavy event last year, Marchant helped recruit a coalition of other election deniers to seek offices of influence over elections with the sole intention of getting their candidate of choice (the Republican) in office, according to a report this week from the news site Salon.
“I knew right then that they had figured out ... we need to take back the secretaries of state offices around the country.” Marchant said in the Salon story. “...They asked me to put together a coalition of other like-minded secretary of state candidates. I got to work, Juan O Savin helped, and we did, we formed a coalition.”
That coalition has put many on high alert, including former President Bill Clinton, who told the Sun, “Jim Marchant and these QAnon-aligned candidates for secretary of state say they don’t care how people vote. They will only certify the results they agree with. That is an existential threat to our democracy.”
Savin is a prominent QAnon influencer who recruited secretary of state candidates whose mindset on election outcomes mirrored Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Marchant’s megaphone is loud. Earlier this month he told a crowd of supporters that no matter how Americans vote in 2024, if he is Nevada’s secretary of state, he will guarantee that Trump — who may run for the office again in two years — will be installed as president.
Mary Blankenship, a graduate researcher for Brookings Mountain West who studies disinformation on the internet and social media, said politicians embracing conspiracy theories had become commonplace. Like Clinton, Blankenship said that’s dangerous.
“You would think that these candidates would be much more responsible, but that’s not the case for a lot of them,” Blankenship said. “Over the summer and leading up to this election, I’ve noticed a lot of politicians and government officials at the forefront of this disinformation and misinformation.”
When Aguilar — a Las Vegas attorney and former staffer for Nevada U.S. Sen. Harry Reid — saw the Republicans working in November 2020 to flip the election results in favor of Trump, he decided to run for secretary of state to, in his words, protect the integrity of our elections. He recently told the Sun that the secretary of state’s role is to faithfully and honestly conduct elections, not to tamper with the outcome.
Aguilar and Marchant are vying to replace Barbara Cegavske, a termed-out Republican who received much criticism from her own party in early 2021 for not going along with Trump-sponsored fraudulent theories about Nevada’s 2020 presidential election results.
“Nevada is a battleground state. And it’s going to determine who the next president is,” Aguilar told the Sun’s editorial board. “If we have an individual who’s in this race to benefit himself and a small group of his friends, we’re going to see an outcome that none of us wanted or even imagined could happen. (Marchant) is in this to impact and influence the outcome of the election. He says it regularly, loud and clear.”
Jim Marchant speaks at a Republican election night watch party, on Nov. 3, 2020, in Las Vegas. In the year since the Jan. 6 riot, Donald Trump-aligned Republicans have worked to clear the path for next time. In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are systematically taking hold of the once overlooked machinery of elections, weakening or replacing the checks in place to prevent partisan meddling with results
According to the UK’s Guardian and other news outlets, Marchant was involved with QAnon’s Savin in recruiting a radical stable of election deniers. Each of those have been endorsed by Trump, including Marchant, Mark Finchem (Arizona), Kristina Karamo (Michigan) and Rep. Jody Hice (Georgia). Hice, despite Trump’s endorsement, lost his primary against Georgia incumbent Brad Raffensperger, who rebuffed Trump’s intimidating 2020 request to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss in that state.
Those states all were narrowly won by Joe Biden over Trump in the 2020 presidential election, leading to multiple attempts by Trump loyalists like Marchant to reverse the results. Trump’s campaign to steal the election here, led by Adam Laxalt, Nevada’s former attorney general and now the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, filed numerous unsuccessful lawsuits claiming voter fraud. Other than a few false votes for Trump that were cast, no meaningful fraud was found in any of the allegations and the lawsuits were all thrown out of court or withdrawn.
But Marchant and his denier GOP friends went one step further, staging a fake Electoral College production Dec. 14, 2020, in Carson City to “certify” Nevada’s electoral votes for Trump, not Biden who won the popular vote in Nevada by 30,000 votes.
The Nevada Republican Party sent the document — titled “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Nevada” — to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., with NV GOP leader Michael McDonald’s name in the return address. Republicans in a handful of states went through a similar forged and coordinated process — all with the same misleading and potentially criminal logic.
The problem is that the people who met on that cold Carson City afternoon outside the Nevada Legislature weren’t electors, and the meeting had no legal standing. Marchant was an “alternate elector” for the sham effort.
Nevada’s real electors had already certified the state’s election that same day in a legal ceremony, awarding all six of Nevada’s electoral votes to Biden, Democratic presidential candidate.
The Republicans from Nevada wanted followers to believe the “brave electors” were standing up for what was right by “casting” electoral votes for Trump. In reality, they were questioning the integrity of the election and sowing distrust in the process.
“He doesn’t believe our president now is duly elected. And that is a scary proposition, because democracy sits on the shoulders of the next secretary of state,” Aguilar said of Marchant. “And I know I’m being dramatic about it, but it’s a serious issue.”
The Sun attempted to contact Marchant and his campaign for this story, but they did not respond to our request. They, like many other Republican candidates, also didn’t accept an invitation to explain and defend their views with the Sun’s editorial board.
Yet, Marchant hasn’t changed his tune since his 2020 loss to Horsford and has gone on record numerous times saying he would not have certified the 2020 election results.
In a campaign ad posted to Marchant’s Twitter account the voiceover claims “it’s not possible” but “anti-American politicians keep winning elections.”
As the voiceover goes on, the ad flashes the names of some prominent national Democratic politicians, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, clearly insinuating that their recent election wins should be called into question.
In response, Jake Tapper of CNN called Marchant “truly deranged” and said the Nevada race could have an impact on “the future of democracy.”
If Marchant wins — polling suggests the race is extremely close — the fate of how votes are counted in Nevada could be in question, said Ken Miller, an associate professor of political science at UNLV.
“If your chief election administrator adheres to conspiracy theories about not just 2020, but elections prior to that, that’s going to have an effect,” Miller said. “Exactly how that would play out, we don’t really know.”
The same could be argued with Marchant’s ties to QAnon, a movement touting a wide-ranging set of debunked conspiracy theories . The group started in 2017 when an anonymous internet user — known as “Q” — claimed to have access to classified information from within the Trump administration, then gained hundreds of thousands of followers and sympathizers around the country. The main conspiracy associated with QAnon attempts to lead people to believe that a global network of Satan-worshiping pedophiles are embedded within Democratic Party circles and other “deep state” factions.
In addition to Marchant’s coziness with the QAnon movement, he has also minimized the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol where Trump backers attempted to stop Congress from certifying the electoral vote in favor of Biden. Trump was impeached for a second time for the “incitement of insurrection” over the deadly mob siege.
In a tweet Saturday, Marchant referred to those who are now serving time for crimes committed that day at the Capitol as “supposed J6” criminals.
In a tweet from earlier that day, Marchant wrote “God bless all of the wrongly accused J6 Prisoners.”
If voters — not just in Nevada, but also across the country — put multiple conspiracy theorists in office, it could lead to an array of issues in the coming years, Blankenship said.
“It’s incredibly worrisome and incredibly dangerous.”