Saturday, Oct. 29, 2022 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
A CNBC headline Thursday was horrifying: “ ‘We’re going to hang you’: DOJ cracks down on threats to election workers ahead of high-stakes midterms.” It referenced a voicemail left for Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich just over one year ago, and the headline was mild compared with the full-length threat.
“When we come to lynch your stupid lying commie (expletive), you’ll remember that you lied on the (expletive) Bible, you piece of (expletive). You’re gonna die, you piece of (expletive). We’re going to hang you. We’re going to hang you.”
Since then, Arizona has continued to be a hotbed of voter and poll worker intimidation. Multiple lawsuits were filed this week to stop voter intimidation and harassment at drop boxes, including an incident when two masked people carrying guns and wearing bulletproof vests showed up to “observe” a drop box in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa.
Fortunately, as the Sun’s Hillary Davis reported, here in Nevada early voting has been smooth sailing. In Clark County, lines are moving quickly and there have been no reported incidents of voter intimidation or technical problems with voting machines.
Poll workers and voters alike are being treated with decency in the Silver State, and that is something we should be proud of and celebrate.
But we can’t help but wonder what our country is coming to when we are celebrating what should be normal. When did it become newsworthy that threats against poll workers and voter intimidation aren’t occurring and elections are running as planned without significant interference from militant far-right extremists?
The relative calm we’re seeing now isn’t for lack of effort by extremists in Nevada.
A group calling itself “Operation Sunlight” has been posting wild conspiracy theories to its website and monitoring the Registrar of Voters Office in Reno. Its members have gone so far off the deep end that Thursday they implied the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department could be part of a nefarious plot with Democrats.
Individuals associated with Operation Sunlight also attempted to recruit ballot drop-box monitors by circulating digital fliers and sign-up forms calling on Nevadans to “Follow Arizona’s lead. Host a tailgate party next to the drop-box near you.”
Fortunately, despite leaders of the group holding several prominent positions in Nevada’s Republican Party, it seems most of their calls have gone unheeded. And thanks to the efforts of Nevada leaders like Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske and Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria, early voting is continuing with relative normalcy.
But again, it’s worth asking: How did we get here? And it’s worth considering what could happen if someone less honorable than Cegavske were to end up in the Secretary of State’s Office.
Cegavske, a Republican and the state’s top elections official, spent hundreds of hours investigating claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election brought forward by the Nevada Republican Party.
As Davis noted in her story Friday, “ ‘While the NVGOP raises policy concerns about the integrity of mail-in voting, automatic voter registration and same-day voter registration,’ 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.’ ”
That’s common sense. Believing it’s possible for voter fraud to occur is not the same as providing evidence that voter fraud did occur.
And yet, Cegavske was censured by her own party because her investigation didn’t turn out the way Republicans wanted. How can they claim to want a fair and impartial investigation into the facts if they’re only willing to accept one outcome of that investigation? How can they claim to be interested in truth, justice or the integrity of elections if they’ve decided that any investigation that doesn’t reach the conclusion they’ve predetermined — even one carried out by a lifelong Republican — must be part of a vast conspiracy?
The simple answer is that they aren’t interested in election integrity, they’re interested in power.
And to secure that power, they’re making sure that any Republican who holds that office in the future will find the smoking gun of election fraud, even if they have to fire it and place it at the scene of the crime themselves.
Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, has admitted as much, repeatedly saying he would refuse to submit for certification the results of any election that doesn’t result in the outcome he wants. He proudly associates himself with conspiracy theorists alleging that millions of Americans across multiple states are working together as part of a decades-long plot to target him and his friends.
Clearly, Marchant hasn’t been paying attention to the politics of Democrats as a national party. For the past two years, they haven’t been able to get their 50 members in the U.S. Senate to agree on their own party’s policies, let alone engage in a highly organized multimillion-person conspiracy.
Beyond the certification issue, Marchant has promised to restrict access to the polls in many other ways in an effort to drive away people who might vote against the GOP.
And yet, here we are. The polls are safe and secure, and running smoothly in Nevada. For that we can thank the efforts of an honorable secretary of state and the exceptional commitment of the Clark County’s voting officials and volunteers, led by the remarkable Gloria. But we must not take that for granted. As people in other countries have discovered, you can lose your vote at the snap of evil fingers.
Only the people of Nevada have the power to keep extremists like Marchant out of the Secretary of State’s Office, and only if we act now by exercising our right to vote.
Extremism is growing and the violent repression of people’s right to vote is no longer a problem of distant countries in foreign lands. It’s happening in Arizona. It’s on our doorstep. And extremist Nevadans are trying to make it happen here. Your vote this year is all you need to ensure you can vote freely tomorrow. Voting is the weapon would-be tyrants fear the most. Use it.
