Left: Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford (Nevada Attorney General's Office). Right: Chairman of the Nevada Republican Party Michael McDonald (KLAS/YouTube). Inset: President Donald Trump listens to a question from a reporter before signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, March 31, 2025 (Pool via AP).
The case against the "fake electors" accused of falsely certifying that President Donald Trump won the 2020 election can move forward in Clark County, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled.
The high court's decision came after a district court in Nevada dismissed the case, holding that Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas, was an improper venue. As the justices wrote in their 12-page order on Thursday, the district court "erred" in its conclusion, and the case should proceed.
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It has been roughly five years since Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to former President Joe Biden, with states such as Nevada pushing Biden over the top. However, so-called fake electors in several states attempted to certify that Trump actually won.
In Nevada, six residents, including Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, mailed from Douglas County "false electoral vote certificates" to the federal courthouse in Clark County. The state indicted them on charges of uttering or offering forged instruments and offering a false or forged instrument to be filed in a public office.
All six of them pleaded not guilty, and they moved to dismiss the indictment against them, arguing that any alleged offense "was complete on mailing and that no uttering or offering took place in Clark County" because the documents, after arriving in Clark County, were transferred unopened to Reno in Washoe County.
The district judge sided with the six defendants, and the state appealed, ultimately landing the case in front of the Nevada Supreme Court.
Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford and his office have argued that the alleged transgressions undertaken by the "fake electors" were not complete upon mailing because "at that point, the documents had not been delivered to a recipient or presented for acceptance." Furthermore, to the prosecutors, although the mail was rerouted, because it first arrived in Clark County, the site is the proper venue for the case.
The state's high court found credence in this argument.
"We agree with the State that Clark County was a proper venue because the offenses involved false statements directed to Judge [Miranda] Du at the federal court in Las Vegas," the justices wrote. "Respondents directed the documents to be sent to the federal court in order to perpetrate a fraud there."
They concluded by writing, at length:
"The district court erred in concluding that the offenses were complete upon depositing the documents for mailing in Douglas County and thus in concluding that Clark County was an improper venue. The offenses charged anticipated the documents' receipt and sought to induce or persuade a recipient to take action by accepting them as true. As they were addressed to and delivered at the federal court in Las Vegas, venue properly laid in Clark County to prosecute the crimes alleged. We reverse the order dismissing the criminal indictment and remand to the district court.
Clark County went for Biden in 2020, while Trump swept Douglas County that year; in the end, Nevada's electoral votes went to Biden. Ford celebrated the news, saying in a statement, "The 2020 fake electors cannot evade accountability in Nevada for their unlawful actions," per The Nevada Independent. "With this ruling, we will return to the Eighth Judicial District Court in Clark County and continue our work to ensure that justice is served."
It is also a victory for those in swing states who have sought to prosecute the people they allege tried to unconstitutionally overturn the will of the voters at the ballot boxes.
Such efforts have failed in other states. In Michigan, the case against 15 "fake electors" was thrown out after a district judge there ruled that they "seriously believed" there were problems with the election. In Arizona, the case against 18 defendants hit a road block when a judge found that the grand jury that issued the indictment had not been given the requisite information on how electoral votes should be counted.
