If you can’t beat ’em, nullify their votes: Trump’s latest suit against Nevada and its voters

Donald Trump along with the Republican National Committee and the Nevada Republican Party, both wholly owned Trump subsidiaries, sued Nevada Friday saying any mail ballots that are not received by or on Election Day must not be counted.

Nevada law requires mail ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked no later than Election Day and received by county election officials within four days after Election Day.

The suit is almost identical to one Trump’s Republicans filed in Mississippi(!?) early this year. (Yet again Nevada is the Mississippi of the West, but this time in a different way.)

Yes, Republican advocacy of “state’s rights” has always been situational.

Other nearly identical suits to disenfranchise a segment of the mailing electorate have already been dismissed (by Trump-appointed judges by the way) in Illinois and North Dakota. 

Trump & Friends keep filing the suits anyway, and presumably more are on the way in the 19 states and territories that require ballots to be counted after Election Day provided they’re post-marked by or on Election Day. 

Even if Trump loses all the suits, they are a vehicle for casting aspersions on democracy and another means to try to dishonestly discredit election results in advance. (As Trump said this week, “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results.…If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” Everyone knows what that means.)

But an additional motive was at work in Trump’s suit in deep red Mississippi: Trump is shopping for a Trumpy federal judge who will make a Trump-friendly ruling that will trigger appeals, maybe go to the Trump-McConnell Supreme Court, and possibly set national precedent and, hence, national law.

In other words, nullify ballots that arrive after Election Day even if they’re postmarked before Election Day in Mississippi, and nullify them nationwide in the process.

Meanwhile, the suit filed in Nevada is only one of many that Trump and Republicans have promised/threatened to file this year in battleground states as part of a concerted and deliberate effort to harass election officials and their employees while maligning and attempting to discredit democracy.

At the very least, the suits will be a time-consuming nuisance for people working in state and local election offices in states across the nation.

At the very worst, given the Weltanschauung of the Trump-packed U.S. judicial system, there is always the possibility – in defiance of what thus far has been ruled to be logic, case law, and constitutional interpretation – that the Republicans could prevail and scrap all ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if those ballots were postmarked before it.

Trump and Republicans would genuinely welcome anything that curbs voting by mail – or more specifically, its impact.

Remember all the Nevada Republican howling and squealing in 2020 about how mail ballots were super vulnerable to fraud? And then remember how the only example of mail voting fraud that came to light was the MAGA guy who said somebody stole his deceased wife’s ballot and fraudulently voted on her behalf? And then it turned out the ballot stealer/fraudulent voter was none other than the MAGA guy himself?

That unsavory incident came after years of Trump, customarily without a shred of evidence, falsely asserting that voting by mail was intrinsically fraudulent.

He’s continued making those false claims in 2024. “We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections,” Trump said earlier this year.

But last month Trump changed his tune, and now is encouraging voting by mail.

Why the flip-flop?

Probably for the same reason there is no repetition of 2020-style evidence-free blathering about mail voting being susceptible to fraud in the suit Trump, the RNC, and the Nevada Republican/Fake Electors Party filed Friday.

They’re not suing because voting by mail is, as Trump put it, “crooked.”

They’re suing to curb the number of mail votes that get counted for the simple reason that Democrats vote by mail more than Republicans do.

“In Nevada’s 2020 general election,” the suit says, “60.3% of Democratic voters voted by mail, compared to just 36.9% of Republican voters.”

Perhaps Trump and Republicans shouldn’t have spent the last several years screeching lies about how “crooked” mail voting is.

Dang. Hoist by their own petard. What to do?

Simple.

If you can’t beat ‘em, nullify their votes.

A version of this column was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.