Nevada’s GOP chair continues to deny he was a fake elector

By Jessica Hill

Thursday, July 7, 2022 | 2 a.m.

Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald doubled down last week on his assertion that his plan to send electoral certificates in favor of Donald Trump to Congress in 2020 was legitimate.

“Many of you remember we were called, they called us fake electors,” McDonald said at a Mt. Rose Republican Women’s Dinner last week. “We weren’t fake. We were elected. We were elected to convention.”

The Sun obtained an audio recording of McDonald’s remarks, and it was unclear what convention McDonald was referring to.

McDonald and James DeGraffenreid, the state party secretary and a member of the Republican National Committee, were two of six “alternate electors” who on Dec. 14, 2020, signed the fake electoral document — titled “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Nevada” — that declared Donald Trump as winner of Nevada’s six electoral votes and sent it to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Trump lost to Biden by about 30,000 votes here, and Nevada’s Republican secretary of state has assured the public that the election was free and fair and untainted by meaningful fraud.

Republicans in six other states where Joe Biden won the popular vote in the November 2020 presidential election sent similar bogus certificates to Washington declaring Trump the recipient of their state’s electoral votes, according to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Trump in his quest to retain office used those faux electoral certificates to justify delaying or blocking Congress’ election certification process on Jan. 6, 2021, according to the select committee.

Last month McDonald voluntarily surrendered his cellphone to the FBI in a Justice Department investigation of fake electors.

The Las Vegas Sun has reached out to McDonald and the Nevada Republican Party multiple times since McDonald surrendered asking for a comment but has never heard back.

The audio obtained by the Sun suggests McDonald has no regrets about his actions.

“We have people that, well, really didn’t exist that all of a sudden existed (and cast ballots in the 2020 election),” McDonald told the GOP women’s dinner audience. “All we wanted to do is have them, have them go through and investigate it. So we did this (alternate elector slate). We didn’t do it in the basement. We didn’t do it in hiding anywhere, guys. We did it on the steps of the state Capitol. It was national news.”

He said that there were “122,000 anomalies” in which multiple votes were cast by the same person, people with unknown addresses voted, and people’s signatures on their mail-in ballots did not match their voter registration papers.

In a case brought by the Trump campaign in Nevada, the state Supreme Court unanimously ruled there was no credible evidence of election fraud in the election here and threw out the legal challenge. Republicans also dropped a case they brought in federal court that alleged fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

The Nevada secretary of state’s office did not return a request for comment for this story, but it spent 125 hours investigating the claims that the Nevada Republican Party brought forward and could not find widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election here.

“While the NVGOP raises policy concerns about the integrity of mail-in voting, automatic voter registration and same-day voter registration,” Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske wrote in a 2021 letter to the Nevada Republican Party about her office’s investigation, “these concerns do not amount to evidentiary support for the contention that the 2020 general election was plagued by widespread voter fraud.”

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, also investigated those claims. The probe found that one person, Donald Kirk Hartle, a registered Republican, voted more than once in the 2020 election.