HENDERSON, Nev. — Dozens of fired-up Donald Trump supporters in Las Vegas gathered Monday to learn how to monitor balloting this November as the GOP’s national party chair Michael Whatley declared the state “absolutely critical” to returning the ex-prez to the White House.
“Nevada is obviously a key swing state in the entire country,” said Whatley. “We know that there are seven real battleground states that decided 2016 that decided 2020 and are going to decide ‘24. Nevada is absolutely critical among those states.”
The GOP leader spoke to reporters alongside a cadre of party regulars including Nevada GOP Chairman Michael McDonald, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, and former acting U.S. attorney general Matt Whitaker. The politicos were there to kick off a training event for poll watchers and other Republican election workers seeking to ensure election integrity.
As it’s been with other states, the actual training was closed to the press, a spokeswoman said.
A plurality of Nevada’s nearly 2 million registered voters — one-third — are registered as nonpartisan. Democrats come in second at 29.32%, and Republicans follow at 28.75%. The rest listed the Independent American Party, the state’s Libertarian Party, or other “minor” parties as their affiliation.
Mail-in voting is crucial in Nevada, with Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, reporting that 65% of June’s primary ballots were submitted via mail or cast electronically by active duty military members.
That doesn’t sit well with politicians such as Lt. Gov. Stavros Anthony, a Republican, who lost an earlier race in 2020 for a Clark County Commission seat when postal ballots received after election day erased the margin of victory he’d achieved.
“I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is today,” Anthony said. “In fact, in the last election, the first time it was implemented, the voter rolls weren’t clean. The signature verification was like 40%, 50%; we had no idea where these ballots were coming from.”
Anthony said the state GOP does need to embrace voting by mail, but ensure that it’s done “legally and with integrity.”
He said the party will have attorneys prepped and ready to file lawsuits over any alleged voting irregularities at the polls or by mail.
Anthony said, “We’re starting to clean the rolls. We’re putting pressure on county clerks to clean the rolls and go through them and get rid of people that are dead, [or] they moved out of town. They should not be getting a mail-in ballot.”
He also cited a pending voter initiative to require ID at the polls, which is expected to be on the ballot this November. The measure got 170,000 voter signatures — 50,000 more, Anthony said, than is required to place the question before voters.
“I guarantee you that is going to pass,” Anthony said.
Matt Whitaker, acting U.S. attorney general under Trump, said election integrity has become a national issue.
“We can’t have a country where almost half of our fellow citizens don’t trust the outcome of an election,” Whitaker said. “We should be able, as the world’s only superpower, to conduct free, fair elections that have election integrity everybody trusts.”
Along with the voter integrity efforts, speakers told volunteers that the GOP message was connecting with voters, something Chairman McDonald emphasized to the press Monday night.
“President Trump has definitely highlighted programs that are for the working men and women, that are for the people here, the service industry,” he said. “The ‘no tax on tips’ is a really large one. We’re working across all party lines to show that if you want a better quality of life, you vote for Donald Trump.”
