Nevada State GOP Chairman Michael McDonald speaks at a Donald Trump campaign rally at Sunset Park Sunday, June 9, 2024.
Friday, June 21, 2024 | 2:55 p.m.
A Clark County District judge approved a motion Friday dismissing the charges against six Nevada Republicans who were accused of submitting “fake elector” ballots in a scheme to swing the 2020 presidential election for Donald Trump.
Judge Mary Kay Holthus ruled that Clark County was not the appropriate court venue to decide the case, noting the submission of the false records occurred in Douglas County in Northern Nevada.
Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford made it clear his office planned to continue pursuing the case, expressing displeasure with the ruling.
“The judge got it wrong and we’ll be appealing immediately,” Ford, a Democrat, told reporters afterward. He declined additional comment.
Defense attorneys bluntly declared the case dead, saying that to bring it now before another grand jury in another Nevada county would violate a three-year statute of limitations that expired last December.
That apparently makes an appeal by Ford’s office the last chance for prosecution.
Nevada GOP chairman Michael McDonald, Republican Party National Committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid, vice chairman Jim Hindle, Clark County Republican chairman Jesse Law, Eileen Rice and Shawn Meehan are the defendants in the case.
On Dec. 14, 2020, the Republicans conducted a ceremony in Carson City in which they signed a document “certifying” Nevada’s six electoral votes for Trump, even though Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the state by about 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 McDonald’s name listed with the return address.
Republicans in a handful of states went through a similar process — all with the same misleading and potentially criminal logic.
The meeting of fake electors, here and in the other five contested states, had no legal standing.
Nevada’s real electors had already certified the state’s election results that same day in a remote ceremony, rightfully awarding all six of Nevada’s electoral votes to Biden.
Fake electors have been convicted in Michigan, and face charges in Arizona and Georgia.
Defense attorneys led by McDonald’s lawyer, Richard Wright, contended that Ford improperly brought the case before a grand jury in Las Vegas — Nevada’s largest and most Democratic-leaning city — instead of Carson City or Reno, northern Nevada cities in a more Republican region where the alleged crimes occurred. They also accused prosecutors of failing to present to the grand jury evidence that would have exonerated their clients, who they said had no intent to commit a crime.
“Crimes are tried and venue lies in the venue in which the offense was committed,” Wright told the judge on Friday. “Signing the document occurred in Carson City.”
Challenged by Holthus to respond, Deputy State Attorney General Matthew Rashbrook argued that “no one county contains the entirety of these crimes.”
“Society is the victim of these crimes,” the prosecutor said. “Voters who would have been disenfranchised by these acts ... would have been victims of these crimes.”
But the judge decided that even though McDonald and Law live in Clark County, “everything took place up north.”
The Nevada case was scheduled for a jury trial in January prior to Friday’s dismissal of charges, according to court documents.
Ford told the Nevada Legislature in May 2023 that his office had spent months investigating the scheme, but that he was unable to bring charges because no state law existed to make such an act illegal.
His testimony was part of a presentation on Senate Bill 133, legislation that sought to establish criminal penalties for anyone taking part in “creating a false slate of electors, serving in a false slate of presidential electors or conspiring to create or serve in a false slate of presidential electors.”
The bill cleared the Democrat-controlled Legislature but was vetoed by Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo.
Ford, when filing charges in December, emphasized he was selective in his language to the Legislature to leave open the opportunity to investigate the group.
“I stated that no statute ‘directly addressed the issue,’ (and) that’s precisely what I meant,” Ford said in December. “That was true then, and it remains true now. But having seen the conduct of these individuals, I thought, and I still think, it would serve the public interest to have a statute that specifically and directly criminalizes these actions.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
