As poet, performer, and social activist Maya Angelou famously said, “When people show you who they are, believe them.” So, when former Sen. Dean Heller boasts about fixing Nevada’s 2024 presidential elections in favor of Trump, believe him.
Heller, who is running for governor of Nevada, constantly boasts about conversations with former President Donald Trump, where he allegedly tells the former president that if he wants to become president then, “one, we have to try to stop this law they’re trying to pass in Washington, D.C., to take over our election laws, and two, we have to change the laws we have here in Nevada,” Heller said.
At a Republican debate on Jan. 6, Heller was booed after claiming to be “the only proven conservative” in the race against Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak.
He used his usual talking points at the debate saying, “I tell [Trump], the only way we can guarantee that, in 2024, we have a Republican president, is we need a leader here in the state of Nevada that understands our election laws and [is] willing to change them.”
After Nevada went for President Joe Biden in 2020, Heller began promoting his version of the Big Lie. Telling The Nevada Independent that although he knew Biden won, “we made it easier to cheat in future elections.” Adding: “After the 2020 election, most Republicans believe President Trump had won that election. This is chaos, and this chaos continues over and over.”
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What Heller is proposing seems to be the GOP’s new platform, not simply continuing to pedal bogus election fraud claims, but now, they’re in the business of fixing elections and cheating about the ones they lost.
As the mountains of documents are gathered and combed through by the House committee investigating Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, evidence is mounting that proves corruption and deception were happening on all local and executive levels.
The latest was uncovered by Politico in a records request. Not one, but three states forged documents declaring Trump the winner where, in reality, Joe Biden had won.
Groups of Republicans in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan gathered together and forged official election paperwork, pretending to be actual electors from the states where Biden won, casting their votes for Trump (who as we know, lost), and sent those fraudulent documents to the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Archivist, as if the materials were real. They were not.
Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that the Senate will act “as soon as tomorrow” on voting rights and elections reform. “It is my intention to once again bring legislation to the floor to fight back against the threats to democracy and protect people’s access to the ballot,” Schumer said.
He continued, saying that if Republicans “continue to hijack the rules of the Senate” to block these bills and “continue paralyzing this chamber to the point where we’re helpless to fight back against the Big Lie,” he’ll “consider the necessary steps” to make the Senate “adapt and act.”
That’s a direct challenge to Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), but particularly Manchin, who spent the last 24 hours flat-out lying about the filibuster, unchallenged by Fox News reporter Chad Pergram. He said the filibuster has been “the tradition of the Senate here in 232 years now […] That’s what we’ve always had for 232 years.” Which, of course, is utter bullshit.
But, Democrats aren’t only tasked with the monumental job of passing the voting rights bills. They’re also constantly playing a game of whack-a-mole and battling the many small Republican-led wins in states like Georgia—where lawmakers are considering a bill to eliminate ballot drop boxes.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in the 2020 election, most absentee voters in metro Atlanta relied on drop boxes rather than depending on the postal service.
But, after 2020, Georgia adopted a new voting law that limited drop boxes to early voting locations and hours, and capped the number of drop boxes at one per 100,000 active voters in each county. As a result, the number of boxes dropped from 87 in 2020 to 20 last year in Cobb, DeKalb, and Fulton counties.
“Many people liked that the boxes were open 24 hours a day in 2020 and right up until the closing of the polls,” Cobb County Elections Director Janine Eveler told the AJC. “There were limited hours in 2021, and also they were shut down completely by Friday before the election. The last weekend and Monday is when they’re needed most after it becomes too late to mail the ballots.
While many GOP-led states push to limit voting rights, the Brennan Center released a report saying that secretary of state candidates in Georgia, Michigan, and Minnesota have more than doubled their overall fundraising, in comparison to 2018 and 2014 midterms.
Axios reports that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s reelection campaign raised four times more money by last June than he had at the same point in 2018. And Trump-backed Rep. Jody Hice raised more money than anyone else in the Georgia secretary of state race.
In Michigan, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, has nearly quintupled her 2018 cycle draw as of last October, coming in at $1.2 million.