Joe Lombardo – the sitting sheriff of Nevada’s largest county – has peddled the Big Lie for political gain, completely disregarding the fact that it led to a violent insurrection and the death of law enforcement officers. With increased threats of voter intimidation and election violence, Lombardo’s refusal to denounce the Big Lie could put Nevadans’ safety at risk.

Read more about Lombardo’s craven campaign tactic below.

Nevada Current: Threats of voter intimidation, extremist violence cloud midterms

Dana Gentry

November 3, 2022

Key Points: 

• Last week, the U.S. government warned that domestic terrorists pose a heightened threat to the midterm elections, and law enforcement is on alert. 

• But if social media sites are any indication, mistrust of the election process and warnings of fraud are rampant in Nevada. 

• Republican gubernatorial candidate and Metro Sheriff Joe Lombardo, Clark County’s top law enforcement officer during three elections, has dipped his toe in election-denier waters, but has refrained from taking the plunge. 

• Lombardo told the Reno Gazette Journal earlier this year that he doesn’t know if the 2020 vote count was accurate. He favors enhanced voter ID requirements and supports a bipartisan election integrity commission that would have authority to audit county election results. 

• “Lombardo is trying not to be an election denier while trying not to piss them off,” says UNLV Political Science associate professor Rebecca Gill. “Its clear to me that Lombardo never has believed that there was significant election fraud, because he’s not a stupid man.” 

• But Gill says Lombardo has missed the opportunity to use his platform as a candidate and sheriff to denounce the lies and distinguish himself from the rhetoric.

Read the full story here.

Bloomberg: Candidates Keep Pushing Election Denial Online — Because It Works

Davey Alba, Jack Gillum

November 2, 2022

Key Points:

• Bloomberg’s review found 160 candidates promoting the falsehood that Biden had lost the presidential race, going back at least a year. Nearly 400 election-denying posts from Republican candidates on Facebook collected at least 421,300 total likes, shares and comments across the platform, and reached as many as 120.4 million people, according to CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analysis tool. On Twitter, 526 tweets promoting the Big Lie carried at least 401,200 shares on the platform, according to Bloomberg’s analysis.

• Some of the candidates in Bloomberg’s analysis appeared to slow their prognostications after winning their primaries, thus needing to make their messages more palatable to a general election audience.

• “Ultimately, using social media to spread election denialism is about sowing doubt in democratic processes and normalizing contestation,” Donovan added. “If we continue down this path, political violence will become a more common response to elections in general.”

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