Nevada’s foremost election denier makes  repeat run at state’s top election job 

Election deniers are once again expected to seek a variety of statewide and congressional offices across the country in the upcoming midterm election. 

Nevada is no exception as incumbent Democratic Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar will face Republican Jim Marchant, an election denier and ardent supporter of President Donald Trump. 

The last time Marchant ran for secretary of state against Aguilar in 2022, he narrowly lost by about  two percentage points. Aguilar warned at the time that electing Marchant means putting someone in control of Nevada’s election process “who will tear down the system because they don’t like it and it hasn’t benefited them.”

“All Nevadans will suffer because of him,” Aguilar said at the time. “Republicans. Nonpartisan. Democrats. Because there will be no voter confidence in the process because he is running the elections.” 

Trump’s attempts to interfere with state elections has forced Aguilar and his office to spend a considerable time defending the state’s election system and procedures from Trump’s efforts to undermine, discredit and assert control over the voting process. Aguilar has  has described Trump as having “deranged obsession with the 2020 election” despite the fact that election was “litigated over 70 times in the courts and not once did they ever present any evidence of fraud or lack of security of the elections.” 

Aguilar’s campaign website has a page devoted to “Thing Nevada voters need to know” about Marchant, which says Marchant “would cancel everyone’s voter registration and force them to re-register and end voting by mail” — positions Marchant stated publicly.

Marchant is one of the nearly 200 election deniers who are expected to be on the ballot in the upcoming General Election nationwide, according to an analysis from Wired. 

Aguilar’s campaign has substantially out-raised Marchant’s, with more than $400,000 as of the second quarter of 2026, and with more than $1 million cash on hand, according to the July 15 state campaign finance reports.

Marchant raised $1,000 in the same time period, all from a single donor, and had about $13 on hand as of the end of the most recent filing period through June.

One of the fights Trump has waged against Nevada’s election was an executive order earlier this year that sought to create a national list of all the voting-age citizens in each state and direct the U.S. Postal Service to control which voters automatically receive mail-in ballots and which don’t. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Trump’s mail-ballot order in mid-September.

Marchant has repeatedly said he wants to end universal mail voting in Nevada.

The Department of Justice also filed a lawsuit against Nevada seeking an unredacted voter registration database. That  lawsuit was dismissed earlier this summer.  

“Nevada is now the 22nd consecutive state or jurisdiction to prevail in federal district court against the Trump administration’s effort to force states to turn over their unredacted voter rolls,” Aguilar said in a statement following the lawsuit being dismissed. “Courts across the country have repeatedly rejected these unsupported demands.”

Though Marchant is usually in lockstep with the president, he told Nevada Current in April that he disagreed with Trump’s executive order seeking to change Nevada’s election system, adding “I am a state’s rights guy.” 

“I don’t think the federal government should have a say of what we do here,” he said at the time. “It should be up to the states. We do have a problem with our election system. We have to clean that up. I don’t want to have a federal law or Constitutional amendment or government change the Constitution to fix this.”

During his first term, Aguilar sponsored legislation making it a category E felony “to use or threaten or attempt to use any force, intimidation, coercion, violence, restraint or undue influence with the intent to interfere with the performance of duties of an elections official.”

The legislation, which was signed by Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, was part of a campaign promise to protect election workers from intimidation and election interference.

Despite Lombardo and Republican Lt. Gov. Stavros Anthony winning midterm elections in 2022 and Trump winning Nevada in 2024, and Marchant himself winning election to a term in the state Assembly in 2016, Marchant previously told the Current he still believes “we’ve had fraudulent elections since 2008.”

Marchant was among those standing next to Nevada’s fake electors in December 2020 as they signed phony electoral college certificates that were sent to Congress. It was later revealed the action was part of a plan hatched by Trump’s legal advisors to stop Joe Biden’s certification as president on Jan. 6, 2021.

In a recent interview with the Reno Gazette Journal, Marchant remained steadfast in support of upending the state’s voting system, including saying he “would like to repeal the law where the (Department of Motor Vehicles) registers people to vote.”

It is the latest in a string of proposals to change the election process in response to unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud.

Marchant in 2022 led efforts in rural Nevada counties to attempt a switch to hand-counting paper ballots. Despite saying he liked early voting, he told the “Pick Your Politics” podcast he wanted to get rid of it. 

Originally, Marchant planned to run in the 2026 Republican primary for the 1st Congressional District but switched to race to run for secretary of state again, saying the office fits his interests better. 

He told the Current he was encouraged to run for secretary of state instead of congress by party insiders, but wouldn’t specify who.

Marchant won his Republican primary over three other candidates with nearly 33% of the vote. 

Marchant  lost his re-election bid in 2018. He then went on to a series of election losses in addition to the failed bid for secretary of state in 2022.