Leading election denier is on the verge of leading Nevada's election system

RENO, Nev. — A leading proponent of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen is on the verge of becoming the chief elections official in Nevada — which would put him in charge of running the vote in the critical swing state for the 2024 presidential election.

If Republican Jim Marchant wins his close secretary of state race, he could fundamentally reshape elections here, with enormous ramifications for how they are run in Nevada. He has called for eliminating mail voting, curtailing early voting and pushing for hand counts of ballots — despite evidence that the practice is more error-prone than using machines — and could generally make it more difficult to vote in the state. If he refused to certify accurate election results down the road, it could sow chaos in the state and nationally.

And Marchant is not alone: He is a leader of a group of hard-right, election-denying candidates in Michigan, Arizona and elsewhere who have similar beliefs. At a rally with former President Donald Trump last month, Marchant promised that his class of pro-Trump secretaries of state would “fix the whole country and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024.”

Despite that, Marchant’s Democratic opponent, Cisco Aguilar, says he’s still not getting the help he needs to win.

Once little-known and often ignored, secretaries of state races are now at the forefront of the battle over how Americans vote. But Aguilar, a first-time candidate running against Marchant, doesn’t believe his race has gotten the attention and resources it deserves, particularly given the implications for the next presidential race. Instead, Aguilar said, his party largely hasn't engaged.

“Nobody will take my calls,” Aguilar said in an interview with POLITICO between events in Reno, Nev. “That's the frustrating part. Here you are, fighting significantly hard, and yet nobody will have a conversation with you about it.”

“People in Nevada expect me to be running a race like the governor and the U.S. senator,” Aguilar continued. “A U.S. senator has $40, $50 million? Our governor has both $15 million? I have $2 million.”

It is a paradox for Aguilar and other candidates like him. The Democratic candidate is still raising record cash for an office that usually draws little fanfare — as of mid-October, Aguilar reported raising $2.2 million, a little less than double the combined fundraising of both candidates for the office in 2018. The few Democratic outside groups focused on these races have lapped Republicans in advertising in key states. The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, the party’s main campaign committee for electing these candidates, already launched its largest ever TV ad campaign, dropping $11 million in Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada.

But the spending is still miniscule compared to competitive federal and gubernatorial races — especially in Las Vegas, which has become one of the most crowded and expensive media markets of the 2022 election.

Marchant’s campaign did not respond to an interview request from POLITICO. He and other members of his coalition do not regularly engage with the mainstream media, sticking to far-right outlets that often amplify their misinformation about the 2020 election.

“Secretary of state races are critical to our country, this cycle especially,” Marchant recently said in an interview with a group called Legacy PAC, which was captured by a liberal tracking organization. “I was asked to run for secretary of state. And I agreed, and the reason is because we control the election system.”

Aguilar, for his part, wanted to run on reforming Nevada’s convoluted and outdated business filing system, an arcane but important part of its secretary of state’s office, as well as protecting access to the ballot. Instead, his race has become all about the future of democracy in one of the most important battleground states.

“When the [GOP] primary results were announced, it just hit me like a ton of bricks,” Aguilar said. “This is about the future of Nevada as a whole. It's no longer about Republican or Democratic priorities. This is about the future of Nevada for all of us.”

The Nevada race also stands out because Marchant is the founder of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, a clearinghouse organization for other like-minded candidates seeking to be their state’s chief election official.

At a rally hosted by Trump earlier in October, Marchant suggested he would put his finger on the scale to help get Trump elected. “We have something in common: President Trump and I lost an election in 2020 because of a rigged election,” Marchant told a cheering crowd while standing at Trump’s side at the rally, alleging he has found problems in elections. “When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024.”

“You better get him in, you need him so badly,” Trump said in response.

The contest has also been a daunting one for Aguilar, an attorney who interned for the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) while he was in law school. There has been sparse public polling of the race, though recent surveys have shown a race within the margin of error: A poll from The Nevada Independent/OH Predictive Insights released on Monday had Aguilar up 3 points over Marchant, while a CNN poll released at the beginning of last month showed Marchant ahead by 3 points.

A historic amount of spending has splashed across the five most competitive secretary of state races — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada — swamping Republicans in advertising.

Data from AdImpact, an ad tracking firm, shows at least $40 million of advertising booked on behalf of Democratic candidates in those states since Sept. 1, compared to around $1 million for Republicans. In Nevada, Democrats have run $7.7 million worth of advertising in that timeframe — and none backing Marchant.

Even so, Aguilar said that he struggled to get people in Washington to hear his pleas, outside of Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), who is up for reelection in 2024, and a handful of groups focused specifically on secretary of state races.

“Federal [politicking] sucks up a lot of that donor base and that's the constant response — ‘CCM is fighting for survival,’” he said, referencing Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who is in one of the closest elections in the country right now. “She determines who leads the Senate. Why is somebody going to care about Nevada and its SOS race?”

Aguilar also said that there has been a messaging gap between what regular voters want to hear and what Democrats have been saying about secretary of state contests.

“That was my frustration in the beginning, because everybody was like, ‘fighting for democracy, fighting for democracy,’” Aguilar said. “Yes, as political insiders, that makes sense. I called my mom, I said, ‘I'm fighting for democracy.’ And she goes, ‘What does that mean?’”

Aguilar added that talking about democracy has become “more of a normalized term” in ads now, but he still regularly talks about kitchen table issues when campaigning.

More Democrats in the state have started to plead with voters about the importance of Aguilar’s contest. In a stump speech to Black retirees gathered at the Martin Luther King Jr. Senior Center in Las Vegas, Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) made sure to name-check Aguilar, urging Nevadans to vote all the way down the ballot, even though Aguilar was not in attendance.

Aguilar is "running against one of five election deniers in the country," Horsford said, "We cannot let that guy get elected because he doesn't believe in fair and free elections," greeted by responses of "that's right," from the crowd.

Horsford defeated Marchant in their congressional district by about 5 points in 2020, and Marchant sued to try to have the results tossed out. Horsford said that he thinks there is a “growing awareness” on the importance of secretary of state races, but he wishes it had developed sooner.

“Look, this is not partisan,” he said, praising outgoing Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske. “I can have someone else. It doesn't have to be a Democrat. It has to be someone who's going to protect people's right to a fair and free election.”

Cegavske was term-limited and could not seek another term. She was censured by the state Republican Party after defending the security and accuracy of Nevada’s elections in 2020.

Even by the standards of election conspiracy theorists, Marchant has adopted extreme policy positions. He has pushed for the elimination of most early voting in the state and has been a major proponent of hand-counting ballots, citing unfounded allegations and lies about voting machines flipping votes.

At Marchant’s urging, a rural red county piloted a program to hand-count ballots for this year’s election. Associated Press reporters who viewed the first day of the count last week reported that it took groups about three hours to count 50 ballots, and mismatched tallies led to recounts. Cegavske’s office ordered the county to cease its count, and litigation is ongoing.

Marchant has also cavorted with prominent proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, while claiming he did not support it himself. Marchant and fellow members of his secretary of state coalition from Michigan, Arizona and New Mexico spoke at a conference on Saturday cosponsored by the coalition and other conspiracy-fueled groups. He also recently promoted a video implying that a handful of Democrats, who represent predominantly blue areas, only won because their elections are rigged.

But Marchant remains unapologetic. “This is an opportunity for us to save our country, and that’s exactly what we are going to do,” he said in an interview with Steve Bannon in October. “These are the most crucial elections in our country. People are starting to realize that.”

Elena Schneider reported from Nevada. Zach Montellaro reported from Washington D.C.