State judge tosses charges against false electors in Nevada

A judge in Nevada has thrown out criminal charges against six Republicans who falsely claimed to be presidential electors for Donald Trump in 2020, concluding that state prosecutors failed to show the six false electors acted with the intent to defraud election officials.

"The State failed to present sufficient evidence from which a reasonable grand jury could infer the requisite intent to defraud," Clark County Judge Mary Kay Holthus wrote, calling the evidence presented by prosecutors "at best, minimal."

Holthus sharply rebuked the case brought by Attorney General Aaron Ford, and it is the latest setback for the prosecutions aimed at GOP allies of Trump who aided his effort to overturn the 2020 election results. Ford indicated he intends to appeal the ruling.

"The District Court's decision is, once again, wrong, and we will appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court, just as we did when the court first dismissed our case against these defendants," Ford said in a statement. "My office will continue to work to hold these fake electors accountable for their actions which attempted to undermine our democracy and erode trust in our elections."

Criminal charges against Trump himself, brought by special counsel Jack Smith as well as county prosecutors in Georgia, were tossed after he won the 2024 election. Cases against those who falsely signed certificates claiming to be legitimate presidential electors have now been thrown out in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Georgia.

After Trump's defeat at the polls in 2020, he and his advisers grew increasingly desperate in their bid to find legal routes to overturn the results. In one last-ditch maneuver, the campaign organized slates of Republican electors to cast votes for Trump in seven swing states that had been certified for Joe Biden.

Many of the so-called "alternate" electors were told their votes were placeholders, meant to count only if Trump prevailed in his lawsuits aimed at reversing the results. But as Trump's courtroom efforts failed, a close circle of legal advisers devised another plan for the false electoral votes: use them to derail the Jan. 6, 2021 session of Congress, when lawmakers were slated to certify the election for Biden. The existence of those false electors became a pretext to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence — who presided over the Jan. 6 session — to declare Trump the winner or block Biden's victory.

A slew of investigations into the events that preceded Jan. 6, 2021 showed that many of those who signed the false Electoral College certificates were not aware of the larger designs to use their votes to disrupt the congressional session or pressure Pence. A judge in Michigan, throwing out charges against the state's false GOP electors, suggested that organizers of the effort might bear responsibility even if the individual electors did not.

Charges are pending in Wisconsin against a key architect of the Electoral College gambit, attorney Kenneth Chesebro, as well as two other allies who worked closely with the Trump campaign.

The case against the Nevada GOP activists, including GOP Chair Michael McDonald, was troubled from the start. Holthus had already thrown it out once, saying it should have been brought in a different district, but it was returned to her by the state Supreme Court.

In her latest ruling, Holthus said that the state also withheld key exculpatory evidence from the grand jury that brought the charges. She also noted that the false electors cast their ballots in public, declared their intent to preserve legal challenges and did not seek to conceal their activities. She emphasized that no Nevada election officials believed the false GOP certificates were legitimate.

"The GOP Certificate was not a document that could legally be accepted, filed, registered, or recorded under Nevada or federal law," Holthus said.