Even after President Biden was sworn in, election denialism gained traction in Nevada, where several virulent social media posts kept the misinformation and conspiracies alive, and local politicians helped amplify the lies.
- Trump’s reelection campaign filed a lawsuit on November 17, 2020, contesting the results in Nevada based on spurious claims of voter fraud. But in early December the state Supreme Court upheld a district court ruling, confirming that “there is no credible or reliable evidence that the 2020 General Election in Nevada was affected by fraud.”
- On December 14, 2020, six Republican leaders in the state signed and notarized fake Electoral College documents to submit to Congress as part of the January 6, 2021, presidential election certification process, making Nevada one of seven states involved in the fake electors scheme to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election. In December 2023, the state indicted all six on felony charges, but a district court judge dismissed the case in June 2024 on grounds that the attorney general had filed it in the wrong venue—Las Vegas instead of Reno or Carson City, where the defendants actually signed the phony documents.
- In total, four cases related to election fraud were heard by Nevada judges, but each case was dismissed due to lack of evidence.
- In Nevada, election deniers such as former state Assemblyman Jim Marchant—who lost his bids for the U.S. House in 2020, secretary of state in 2022, and the U.S. Senate in 2024, despite Trump’s endorsements—have railed against the use of ballot drop boxes and mail-in voting. He is also among the far-right Nevadans pushing to eliminate voting machines in favor of hand counting paper ballots, a process experts warn would make elections “more prone to fraud, not less.” In addition, Marchant has played a key role in implementing a national strategy to put Trump loyalists in state positions of oversight of the 2024 presidential election.
- In 2022, one county in Nevada made headlines for attempting to hand count ballots until it was shut down when the state Supreme Court ruled that the procedure violates state law.
- In 2022, when Republican county sheriff Joe Lombardo was running for governor, he acknowledged that President Biden won the 2020 election but questioned whether it was “fair and square” and also cast doubt on the process by expressing concern about the “sanctity of the voting system,” a lack of public confidence with voting, and the state’s recent adoption of universal mail-in ballots, which he claims has “mechanisms in there to create an environment for fraud.” Lombardo has also vowed to repeal the use of universal mail-in ballots and implement stricter voter ID requirements in Nevada.
- In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, at least seven Nevadans have faced criminal charges for contributing to the violence that day—including Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right militia group the Oath Keepers, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison after being convicted on charges of seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, and tampering with documents and proceedings.
- In 2023, newly elected Governor Joe Lombardo (R) signed a law championed by newly elected, pro-democracy Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D) to toughen the penalty for harassing or threatening election workers.
- In 2023, the Nevada Legislature passed SB 133, a bill that would have prohibited “a person from creating or serving in a false slate of presidential electors or conspiring” to do so and called for state penalties for anyone convicted of falsifying elector slates. Governor Lombardo vetoed the bill, saying that while he agreed with the effort to secure elections he objected to the severity of the proposed punishment.