(CN) — When Nevada holds its primary election on June 14, GOP voters will consider candidates for secretary of state, typically a sleepy contest over who can out-administrate the other. One thinks Nevada voters have not actually elected anyone for the last 16 years.
Appearing on a podcast in January, Jim Marchant claimed that because of a conspiracy financed by billionaire George Soros, “we haven’t in Nevada elected anybody since 2006. They have been installed by the deep state cabal.”
Merchant’s failed 2020 campaign for Nevada’s 4th Congressional District ended with him filing a lawsuit alleging election irregularities that asked the judge to order a new election. The judge dismissed his claims, saying she lacked jurisdiction. Ever since, Marchant has claimed he was the victim of election fraud and has vowed to “overhaul” the election system in the state.
Election experts and officials say that baseless claims of rigged elections could lead to eroding trust in the nation’s democratic institution. Marchant, who did not respond to requests for comment, is not the only candidate seeking to become their state’s chief election officer who has advanced false claims of a stolen presidential election — claims that have been rejected time and time again by courts across the country.
In May 2021, Marchant held a meeting in Las Vegas to convene fellow candidates gunning for other states’ secretary of state offices.
They dubbed themselves the America First Secretary of State Coalition, a group made up of Marchant, Kristina Karamo of Michigan, March Finchem in Arizona, California’s Rachel Hamm, Jody Hice of Georgia and Mark Finchem in Arizona.
While speaking at a conference in October 2021, Marchant said attendees at the meeting also included Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO behind several lawsuits challenging the 2020 election that were later tossed by the courts, according to PolitiFact.
The coalition’s website claims a years-old conspiracy by the “globalist establishment,” not just in Nevada but nationwide, has undemocratically decided elections via digital voting machines.
“In order to win, we have to play their game better,” the website says.
According to the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, voters in 27 states will decide who heads their secretary of state offices this year. About two-thirds of those races featured a candidate that denied the results of the 2020 elections in social media posts or helped file lawsuits seeking to overturn the election.
At the same time, candidates in secretary of state races are seeing an influx of cash. The Brennan Center for Justice found in February that secretary of state races around the nation — particularly in battleground states — have seen a spike in the rate of funding not seen in previous contests, with some of the money coming from out-of-state donors.
Just two years ago, then-President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign pushed a narrative that the changing rules around voting during the Covid-19 pandemic would lead to voter fraud, even before poll workers around the country opened precincts for the 2020 general election.
It was a narrative that played with fire, said Dan Lee, a political science professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.
“Our democratic institutions work so long as we have trust in them, and that people see them as legitimate,” Lee said.
In the fallout of the 2020 elections, secretaries of state across the union, Republican and Democrat alike, worked to defend their states’ election infrastructure. In Arizona, election officials rebutted point-by-point a review of the state’s 2020 election results by Cyber Ninjas, a now-defunct firm paid by pro-Trump sources to to audit the numbers, Lee said.
But Marchant’s campaign also comes as Nevada’s outgoing Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, faced censure from her own party last April for refusing to launch an investigation into allegations of fraud surrounding the 2020 election.