Judge Drops Nevada Fake Electors Case for Second Time

A Nevada judge has dismissed criminal charges against six Republicans accused of submitting a bogus certificate declaring Donald Trump the winner of the state’s 2020 presidential election, marking the latest collapse in state-level prosecutions of the fake electors scheme. Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus ruled Thursday that prosecutors failed to present sufficient evidence that the defendants intended to deceive government officials — a required element of the forgery charges — and that the state withheld exculpatory evidence from the grand jury.

Background

Joe Biden won Nevada in the 2020 presidential election by 33,596 votes, securing all six of the state’s electoral votes. On December 14, 2020, six Republican electors gathered outside the Nevada Legislature in Carson City, held a public ceremony broadcast online, and signed a certificate giving Nevada’s electoral votes to Trump. The documents were later mailed to federal and state officials.

According to NPR, the defendants included Michael McDonald, chair of the Nevada Republican Party, and Jesse Law, former chair of the Clark County Republican Party, along with James DeGraffenreid, James Hindle III, Shawn Meehan, and Eileen Rice. Each faced two felony counts: offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument, carrying maximum sentences of four to five years in prison.

The Ruling

This was the second time Holthus dismissed the case. In June 2024, she threw out the charges on venue grounds, ruling that Clark County was not the proper jurisdiction. The Nevada Supreme Court unanimously reversed that decision in November 2025, sending the case back to Southern Nevada.

In her August 13 ruling, Holthus found that the defendants’ open conduct undermined the prosecution’s theory of fraudulent intent. “The fact that Defendants openly announced both their actions and their asserted purpose, rather than concealing their conduct or attempting to secretly induce governmental reliance, weighs against a reasonable inference that they acted with fraudulent intent,” she wrote, as reported by The Nevada Independent.

The judge also determined that the state failed to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence to the grand jury, which she said “independently undermine[d] the integrity of the indictment.”

Reaction and Appeal

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat who is running for governor in 2026, announced his office will appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court. “The District Court’s decision is, once again, wrong, and we will appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court, just as we did when the court first dismissed our case against these defendants,” Ford said in a statement to the Reno Gazette Journal. “My office will continue to work to hold these fake electors accountable for their actions which attempted to undermine our democracy and erode trust in our elections.”

Defense attorney Richard Wright, representing McDonald, called the planned appeal “hasty” and “premature,” saying it “reeks of continuing a politically motivated and legally doomed prosecution.”

Legislative Gap

A key issue underlying the case is that Nevada law does not specifically criminalize submitting alternate electoral certificates. The legislature passed bills in 2023 (SB133) and 2025 (SB102) to address this gap, but Gov. Joe Lombardo vetoed both — citing disproportionately harsh penalties in the first instance and First Amendment and due process concerns in the second. As UPI noted, prosecutors were left relying on generic forgery statutes that the judge determined were not designed for the conduct at issue.

Broader Context

This dismissal marks the fourth of five state-level fake elector prosecutions to collapse. Cases in Michigan and Georgia have been dismissed, and Arizona’s case is in procedural limbo after Attorney General Kris Mayes dismissed her office’s prosecution as a legal maneuver to restart the grand jury process. Only Wisconsin’s case, targeting the scheme’s architects rather than the electors themselves, remains active, according to AP News.

In November 2025, President Trump issued pardons to scheme participants, including the six Nevada defendants, covering potential federal criminal exposure. The pardons did not shield the defendants from state-level charges.

What’s Next

Ford’s appeal could take more than a year to resolve, meaning he is unlikely to still be attorney general when the case reaches its next decision point. The Nevada Supreme Court would need to find error on both grounds identified by Holthus — insufficient evidence of intent and the withheld evidence issue — to revive the charges. As Wikipedia documents, the case has already been through multiple procedural twists since the December 2023 indictment.

The structural question of whether Nevada’s forgery statutes can reach conduct that was publicly broadcast and openly announced will persist unless the legislature passes a targeted law that survives a gubernatorial veto. With Lombardo’s term running through January 2027, the legal landscape for prosecuting fake elector schemes in Nevada remains uncertain.