Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump reacts during the CNN Presidential Debate at the CNN Studios on June 27, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. Former President Trump and U.S. President Joe Biden are facing off in the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
In April, Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee announced an “aggressive” program to discredit democracy in Nevada and other battleground states.
As expected/threatened, lawsuits are a central tactic in the Trump campaign’s strategic effort to preemptively undermine, and overturn if necessary, the 2024 election results. Trump and his minion organizations have filed dozens of suits in multiple states, including Nevada.
Although this year the Trump team has reportedly hired better lawyers than in 2020, analysts generally think the suits are about as legally unsound as the more than five dozen election denial suits filed by Trump and his allies following the 2020 election – suits that were laughed out of courts in Nevada and nationwide.
But the merit of the cases might be irrelevant. In July, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws crafted by mere mortals do not apply to Donald Trump, a clear indication that the court is content to take its place as just another obedient Trump minion organization.
So it’s possible the high court could actually agree not only to hear but also to rule in favor of some of Trump’s nuisance suits, instead of pretending the suits don’t exist, which was the court’s go-to approach after the 2020 election.
One of Trump’s suits in Nevada claims any Nevada mail ballots that are not received by or on Election Day must not be counted. Nevada law allows for mail ballots postmarked on Election Day to be accepted and counted if they are received by county election officials within four days.
Given the overwhelming popularity of voting by mail in Nevada, if courts (including the U.S. Supreme Court) were to hear and rule favorably on that suit, it could conceivably alter the outcome of a close election (and not just Trump’s).
Other suits Trump filed in Nevada, as a practical matter, would likely be irrelevant to election results. For instance, the most recent suit seizes on one of the Republicans’ most fashionable of late hot-button non-issues, the danger of noncitizens voting.
Every credible analysis of this make-believe problem reveals that in addition to already being illegal, noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare.
Even if an inflated estimate in Trump’s suit about noncitizens voting in Nevada were accurate, it would amount to an infinitesimal portion of votes (0.0o3%), far too few to have an impact on election results.
But the point of Trump’s suits in Nevada and elsewhere isn’t to nullify mailed votes (though Trump and Republicans would certainly welcome that outcome). And nor is the point to stop noncitizens from voting (although shouting “boo” about noncitizens is the the hot new Republican fad).
The point of the suits is to cast doubt on the validity of the election, just like Trump did in the run-up to the 2020 election.
Trump’s aggressive attempts to interfere with and pollute the 2024 election is of a piece with his overall vision of rendering democracy discredited and discarded, an empty anachronistic word with no more meaning in the U.S. than it has in Russia.
Who cares?
Election Day in 2020 was Tuesday, Nov. 3, but we didn’t know for sure that Joe Biden won Nevada and Trump lost the state until Saturday Nov. 7.
Election Day in 2022 was Tuesday, Nov. 8, but we didn’t know for sure that Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto defeated Adam Laxalt until Saturday, Nov. 12.
Election Day 2024 is on Nov. 5. Unlike 2020 and 2022, Nevada election officials can now begin counting mailed ballots on the morning of Election Day, which should speed the process of determining the winner.
But the presidential race in Nevada will almost certainly be extremely close, and there’s a good possibility, maybe a probability, that results in Nevada and some of the other swing states won’t be known until later that week.
Trump may well be the winner.
But as he has repeatedly made clear, on the night of Nov. 5, 2024, Trump will declare that he won, whether he did or not.
That would be a rerun of election night in 2020 – or the wee hours of the next morning, to be specific – when Trump falsely declared “frankly, we did win this election.”
For months – for his entire political career – Trump has been saying he will not accept election results unless he wins while maliciously plotting and scurrying and burrowing to preemptively discredit any result that says otherwise.
Most voters, including a substantial portion of Trump’s supporters (including those who are in or own local media), know full well that Trump is deliberately lying and scheming to erode public trust in elections.
But much of the electorate is in a precarious and perilous state of mind, and perhaps more authoritarian-curious than at any point in U.S. history.
So if and Trump does win Nevada for a change, it probably won’t be because voters didn’t know what they were doing, but because they didn’t care.
In other words, even if Trump loses, that the election is as close as it is suggests Trump’s long-running crusade to discredit democracy is going really rather well.