Nevada is ground zero in the fight for a fair 2020 election

In 2016, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats spent months spinning yarn about how Donald Trump “wouldn’t accept the election results” if he lost — then proceeded to spend nearly three years refusing to accept their own defeat with a conspiracy theory about Vladimir Putin stealing the election.

Nevada Democrats are apparently following the same playbook, upending the state’s entire electoral process with less than three months to go before a presidential election, even as Biden surrogates hypocritically accuse President Trump of threatening election integrity.

In 2016, President Trump lost Nevada by fewer than 28,000 votes out of more than a million cast. Clearly, this has Joe Biden’s campaign worried—and the former vice president’s allies in control of the Nevada state government have sprung into action, using COVID-19 as a cover for the most outrageous series of electoral reforms in American history.

The legislation in question, AB4, implements just about every dirty trick Democrats have ever cooked up to give themselves an electoral advantage.

For instance, it allows for “ballot harvesting,” whereby partisan activists —paid or volunteer— can go to people’s homes who they believe will vote for their candidate, “collect” those ballots and then submit them to election authorities. These partisan harvesters can even “assist” voters, including those of very advanced age, in filling out their ballots.

AB4 also stipulates that every single voter on the rolls will receive a mail-in ballot — including voters who may be planning to vote in person. Voter registration rolls are, of course, notoriously poorly pruned, containing the names of voters who are deceased, no longer eligible to vote, or have simply moved away. Each of these people will have ballots printed in their names and mailed out to the addresses associated with their prior registration, every one of which could be considered valid if filled out and mailed in, or even “harvested.” In fact, ballots can be postmarked up to a week after the election and still be valid.

To pretend that such a system does not create opportunities for fraud flies in the face of both common sense and experience, which shows that some activists really are willing to use the ballots of people who otherwise did not intend to vote in order to create fraudulent votes.

Nevada Democrats, however, went even further. Under the terms of the bill, mailed-in ballots without postmarks will be accepted up to three days after the election. If Donald Trump wins Nevada by a thin margin on Election Day, there is a very real possibility Democrats could spend the subsequent three days rustling up the ballots they need to make up the deficit. Ballots can even be moved around and combined into one envelope, and all the ballots inside will still be presumed valid. There is simply no way to create an airtight system — especially since we won’t be able to rely on a postal service that will already be overwhelmed by a dramatic increase in mailed ballots this year.

The brazenness of this effort to rig the Nevada election is truly stunning. Under the new rules, the integrity of the election will depend entirely on the honesty of every single “ballot harvester,” postal employee, and election official in the state — all in an environment where the incentives to cheat are clear and present.

There is no reason whatsoever to believe that a single Nevadan would have been unable to vote under the rules that were already in place. Anyone who wished to receive an absentee ballot would get one. Those who wished to vote in person would be able to do so like normal. Nothing about the coronavirus pandemic would have changed a single thing about that.

In short, AB4 is not about protecting Nevadans from COVID or ensuring free and fair elections — it’s about pushing the boundaries of the law and the Constitution to ensure a Democratic Party victory, even if it means facilitating fraud.

If these rules are allowed to stand, Democrat-controlled state governments around the country would follow suit as quickly as they could. That’s why the Trump campaign is suing to prevent these changes from taking effect. Every valid voter has a right to cast their ballot, and Americans have a collective right to an established electoral process capable of producing a clear and reliable outcome.