In Case You Missed It, new reporting from the Nevada Independent highlights how Adam Laxalt’s efforts to spread the Big Lie in Nevada led to widespread distrust in the elections process in rural counties. 

The “face of” the Big Lie in Nevada, Laxalt started raising doubts about the 2022 election just weeks after he announced his campaign for Senate. The New York Times later reported he was “laying detailed groundwork” for lawsuits to contest the election months before a single ballot was cast. 

Laxalt was the co-chair of Trump’s 2020 campaign and orchestrated failed lawsuit after failed lawsuit to stop a peaceful transfer of power. He has centered his campaign around his allegiance to Trump and old lies about the 2020 election and employs an insurrectionist as a senior campaign operative.

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Nevada Independent: How rural Nevada became the next battleground for the ‘Big Lie’

Sean Golonka // 10.23.22

Key Points: 

• Since the conclusion of the 2020 election, though, a stream of Trump’s most fervent supporters and allies in Nevada have led calls to overturn the results of the election and spread unproven claims of widespread election fraud while casting doubt on the state’s election system.
• That messaging was repeated by prominent Republicans in the following months. Adam Laxalt, a U.S. Senate candidate, told voters in rural counties during campaign events last fall that their votes would count, while election issues actually stemmed from urban Clark County, the only Nevada county with more registered Democrats than Republicans, according to reporting from NBC News.
• Meanwhile, in Douglas County, where Trump defeated Biden by 29 points, the county’s top election official reportedly faced pressure from Laxalt, who served as Trump campaign co-chair in Nevada in 2020, to conduct an audit of ballot signatures from the 2020 election, according to records obtained by the left-leaning watchdog group American Oversight.
• “I advised him that the law states that these signatures from the mail ballots are part of the official ballot and that under the law I am now allowed to release them. He argued with me stating he had never heard such a thing. I asked him if he would like me to email him the laws that I was referring to and he declined,” Douglas County Clerk Amy Burgans wrote in an email to the Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Mark Wlaschin.

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