This Tuesday, the Attorney General of Nevada gave details of the case against six Republican officials who tried to alter the result of the 2020 elections. It is the third State to bring to trial the scandal of the false voters who tried to derail Joe Biden's victory in the Electoral College. “The charges are the culmination of a long and careful investigation of actions taken after the 2020 elections,” prosecutor Aaron Ford said this afternoon at a press conference. If found guilty, the false voters could face up to five years in prison.
The six defendants are linked to the Republican Party. They are the president at the local level, Michael McDonald; the president of the organization in Clark County (where Las Vegas is located), Jesse Law; a member of the national committee, Jim DeGraffenreid and state vice presidents Jim Hindle, Shawn Meehan and Eileen Rice. All have been indicted by a grand jury on charges of falsifying documents and filing a fraudulent form. There is still no date for the trial.
Three years ago, just after the presidential election, the group certified to Congress and the National Archives that Trump had won Nevada. In reality, Biden won the State by three percentage points and more than 33,000 votes. The Democrat took all six Electoral College votes. When Republican votes arrived in Washington they were ignored. Nevada was not the only place where this fraud attempt occurred. It was repeated in six other pivotal states: Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Wisconsin.
Michigan and Georgia have opened legal proceedings against false voters. In July, the Michigan Attorney General charged 16 people, also linked to Republicans, with eight criminal charges including falsification of documents and conspiracy to commit electoral fraud. It is the most severe case currently being carried out, as the accused face 14 years in prison. Sixteen other defendants face similar accusations in Georgia, where they have pleaded not guilty. Among them is Trump himself, in one of the most delicate causes he faces. In Wisconsin, on the other hand, 10 members of the Republican Party avoided going to trial by admitting that they had sent a false certification of the election with the aim of derailing Biden's arrival at the White House.
Nevada now joins this battle eleven months before the next presidential elections. “We cannot allow attacks on democracy to go unanswered,” prosecutor Ford said last week when the indictment was unsealed. The news was overshadowed locally on Wednesday, December 6, by a shooting at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, which left three people dead. Ford says he trusts that the judicial system will prove him right.
The prosecutor, a Democratic Party official in a Republican-governed state, has a long list of witnesses prepared. Employees from the National Archives, the Postal Service, the state authorities in charge of organizing the elections and prosecutors paraded before the grand jury. Among the prosecution witnesses was also Kenneth Chesebro, the pro-Trump lawyer who has admitted his responsibility in the plot that sought to change the fate of the elections. In the end, the grand jury found the evidence presented strong enough for charges to be filed.
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Chesebro is one of the defendants in the case of false voters in Georgia. On October 20, the lawyer pleaded guilty to a crime of submitting false forms. In this way he avoided going to trial and obtaining a more severe sentence in court. Chesebro will be on probation for five years and must collaborate by testifying in local proceedings. This could mean bad news for the Nevada defendants, as the lawyer is considered one of the masterminds of the scheme.
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