BREAKING: Republican election official in Nevada paves the way for election certification refusals nationwide
Tuesday's vote in Washoe County to refuse to certify results of a June 11 primary election there is a troubling harbinger of election chaos to come.
In a stunning turn of events, a Republican official in Nevada sided with election deniers on Tuesday and refused to certify the results of a recent primary election — results that showed the official had beaten her competitor, an election denier himself.
The decision came after hours of public comment by local election denier residents at a meeting of the Washoe County Commission when Clara Andriola, a Republican who has been ousted from her party for refusing to tow the party line on election conspiracies, voted against certifying results from the very primary she won on June 11. Andriola’s vote paves the way for local conspiracist election officials across the country to use certification as a means with which to call any election that doesn’t go their way into question — up to and including November’s contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
“Refusal to certify elections is an attempt to cast doubt on the results,” the voting rights group All Voting is Local said in a statement. “This is an unacceptable attempt to undermine our democracy and a pattern of practice that severely harms Nevada voters.”
I would add that Andriola’s actions harm all American voters. That’s because her decision to refuse to certify the results of the June 11 primary — which was a reversal of her previous decision to certify the same results — will be used by election deniers and conspiracists across the country as a precedent that certification is discretionary.
Andriola based her decision on claims made by election denier residents at the meeting that an unidentified person who was present during a recount of the primary results was seen carrying a thumb drive. Some of the conspiracists who spent hours today railing on the board to refuse to certify results cited the presence of the person supposedly carrying a thumb drive as proof that election fraud had been committed — with no evidence other than that someone, at some point, had a thumb drive in a room where votes were being counted.
“Hearing that, I am not going to certify the vote,” Andriola said, adding that she is “not an election denier.” “It creates doubt and that’s what we’ve heard for however many hours we’ve been here.”
“Doubt” over the integrity of elections — often in the form of unfounded conspiracies about election fraud — has been used over and over in recent years as election conspiracists serving as local election officials have refused to certify results. But that’s not the way certification is supposed to work. Election law experts agree unanimously that state certification laws are not a matter of interpretation, and that officials like Andriola are required to simply certify the votes that have been counted — not use certification as launching point for fraud investigations.
Note: Many editions of this newsletter are free but this one is behind a paywall because this story is the result of many months of investigation into the issue of certification and tracking of developments in Washoe County. American Doom is the first publication to have raised the red flag about certification, which is now seen as a key plank of Donald Trump’s plans to call November into question. To support American Doom’s work exposing election denial officials, right-wing extremists and other threats to democracy, subscribe here.
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