Nevada Republican gubernatorial candidate Joey Gilbert speaks to guests during a bus tour throughout Las Vegas Monday, May 16, 2022. WADE VANDERVORT
Thursday, June 16, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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The polls had been closed for two hours Tuesday night in Nevada and a few results started to trickle in showing an outcome Reno attorney and gubernatorial candidate Joey Gilbert wasn’t satisfied with. He immediately took to social media to cry foul — a somewhat common move lately from Republicans who come up short at the polls. After Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo won the GOP nomination, Gilbert in a Facebook post proclaimed he “smells a lawsuit because this stinks.”
“I will concede nothing,” he wrote in the post. “No one likes No Show Joe and he absolutely is not beating me, and will not beat me in a fair fight/race. There’s a reason a real fighter with real legal teams is in this fight. We fix our elections, and we fix everything. Standby.”
The claims of fraudulent elections have been a persistent rallying cry for some Republicans, many of whom are echoing former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 president election was stolen. Trump lost to President Joe 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.
On Tuesday, some of those Republicans who for the past two years touted claims of fraud picked up primary election victories in the same system they claimed was broken when the result wasn’t what they desired.
Former Attorney General Adam Laxalt, who filed numerous lawsuits alleging a fraudulent outcome on behalf of Trump, won the primary in the race for the U.S. Senate and will be in the national spotlight for the general election against incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat.
That means his election skepticism theories will also be front and center. Same for Jim Marchant, who won the Republican primary in the race for secretary of state — the person who watches over the election and would oversee the next presidential election.
Gilbert’s threats caught Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald off guard. McDonald, at Lombardo’s victory party, said, “I don’t know what his comments alluded to. My goal is to unite the party and bring everyone together so we have a Republican red wave.”
But McDonald has also been involved in promoting false outcomes, which could arguably have divided the party, as some Republicans acknowledge that Biden won the presidency fairly.
McDonald and seven other Republican leaders from Nevada in December 2020 staged a plot that they led voters to believe was an act of “brave electors” standing up for what is right by casting their electoral votes for Trump.
The Nevada Republican Party sent a document — titled “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Nevada” — to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., with 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.
Those people weren’t electors, and their meeting had no legal standing. Nevada’s real electors had already certified the state’s election that same day in a remote ceremony, awarding all six of Nevada’s electoral votes to the Democratic presidential nominee, Biden.
Gilbert has since posted another message with a softer approach, saying “This fight is not over. Many of you know that it had to happen this way. I knew this would be the fight of my life and I’m not bowing or tapping out. Period. We will march on and do what’s necessary for we the people, even if it means risking everything.”
Marchant won by 17.8 percentage points against his fellow GOP candidates, while simultaneously running on a platform that the 2020 election was rigged. He called himself a “victim of election fraud” after losing by 16,000 votes to Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., in 2020.
Marchant also organized a coalition with Trump allies, including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell; Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, who according to Vice pushed Trump to declare martial law to stay in power; and Jim Hoft, founder of a conspiracy website, to investigate claims of election fraud in Nevada and across the country.
There is no proof of widespread fraud. The Nevada Secretary of State’s Office, led by a Republican, spent more than 125 hours investigating those claims and found no evidence to support fraud. In addition, judges in Nevada and across the country, including ones appointed by Trump, dismissed dozens of lawsuits alleging fraud.
The Associated Press also conducted a review of every potential 2020 voter fraud case in the six states where Trump disputed the results, and found “nowhere near enough cases to change the outcome.”
Marchant did not return requests for comment about his claims, but he said in a statement following the win that it was a “historic night on the road for election integrity.”
“I am proud to join the rest of our excellent Republican ticket and move toward a victory in November,” Marchant said in the statement. Democratic Secretary of State candidate Cisco Aguilar called Marchant’s election fraud claims “scary,” saying Marchant is playing a “dangerous game with Nevadans.”
“I am very concerned,” Aguilar said. “When I originally decided to run for this race, I didn’t realize the implications we’d be facing today. It’s a huge burden, it’s a huge responsibility because it’s not just about my race anymore. This is about ’24. This is about future races in Nevada as a whole, all the way down from the local level to federal and state races.”
GOP treasurer candidate Michele Fiore also won her primary last night and also claimed the election in 2020 was stolen.
“Make no mistake,” Fiore said in a debate in February when she was running for governor, “there’s voter fraud, and (Trump) won Nevada.”
When asked if she believed she won the election last night fair and square, and if so, what changed between last night and the 2020 election, her campaign spokesperson Rory McShane, whose firm also runs Marchant’s campaign, said that Fiore is “committed to providing financial common sense for the state of Nevada,” declining to answer the question.
Laxalt’s campaign did not return the Sun’s request for comment about if his win Tuesday changed his thoughts on the 2020 election. The Sun also wanted to ask him if he’d continue with the lawsuits if he loses in November to Cortez Masto.
Voters can look to his actions in 2020.
“There is absolutely voter fraud,” Laxalt said in November that year on Tucker Carlson’s TV show on Fox News. “We’ve confirmed dead voters, and so finally we’re no longer being accused of producing zero fraud. Now we’re being accused of not producing systemic or widespread fraud.”
