The Navarro Report
A Las Vegas judge has dismissed criminal charges for a second time against the six Nevada Republicans accused of submitting a fraudulent certificate declaring Donald Trump the winner of the state’s 2020 presidential election, dealing another blow to the dwindling number of state prosecutions tied to the fake elector scheme.
Clark County District Judge Mary Kay Holthus ruled Thursday that prosecutors failed to present sufficient evidence that the defendants intended to defraud state officials when they signed and submitted the certificate. Holthus went further, finding that the state also withheld material exculpatory evidence from the grand jury that indicted the group, a failure she said independently undermined the integrity of the case. Notably, Holthus pointed to the fact that the defendants publicly announced both their actions and their stated purpose at the time, rather than concealing what they were doing, as evidence cutting against any claim of deceptive intent.
The six defendants, Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, Vice Chair Jim Hindle, Republican National Committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid, then-Clark County GOP Chairman Jesse Law, Shawn Meehan and Eileen Rice, were indicted in late 2023 on felony forgery and false-instrument charges carrying penalties of up to five years in prison. This is not the first time Holthus has thrown out the case. She dismissed it once before on jurisdictional grounds, only for the Nevada Supreme Court to unanimously overturn that ruling and send the case back to her courtroom. Attorney General Aaron Ford’s office has said it will again appeal to the state’s highest court, a process that, if it mirrors the last cycle, could stretch beyond a year.
Nevada’s dismissal is not an isolated result. Similar fake elector prosecutions have already been dismissed or dropped in Arizona, Michigan and Georgia, and a federal case against Trump himself for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election was dropped in late 2024 after he won a second term. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes dismissed her office’s case earlier this year but has said she intends to pursue a new grand jury indictment. Of the original wave of state-level prosecutions launched after the 2020 election, only Wisconsin’s case remains actively pending, making it the last significant test of whether any fake elector will face criminal consequences at the state level.
Holthus’s opinion also noted something with legal significance beyond this case: Nevada’s own attorney general had, at one point, acknowledged that state law did not clearly criminalize the submission of alternate elector certificates at the time the defendants acted, and later supported legislation to close that gap going forward. That acknowledgment, she wrote, provides context for why the underlying charges were inadequate to begin with, a finding that could complicate future prosecutions in other states relying on similar theories.
Voting rights advocates were quick to frame the ruling as a warning sign heading into the 2026 midterms, arguing that the lack of consequences for the 2020 fake elector scheme removes a deterrent against future attempts to interfere with how votes are certified. Nevada’s attorney general, for his part, has pledged to keep pursuing the case through the appellate process, framing the dismissal as a procedural setback rather than a verdict on the underlying conduct.
The pattern extends beyond Nevada. In each state where these cases have failed, prosecutors have run into a version of the same problem: proving that people who acted openly, under legal theories publicly circulated by Trump campaign attorneys at the time, harbored the specific intent to deceive rather than a good-faith belief that their actions were a legitimate contingency measure pending litigation. That distinction, between an aggressive but transparent legal maneuver and outright forgery, has proven far harder to establish years after the fact than it may have seemed in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election.
For finance and compliance professionals, the unraveling of these prosecutions is a reminder of how high the evidentiary bar runs for proving intent in cases involving formal documents and certifications, a standard that shows up just as often in fraud and internal-controls contexts as it does in election law. Prosecutors here were undone in part by a paper trail that showed open, documented action rather than concealment, and by a failure to hand over evidence that cut against their own theory. Controllers overseeing internal investigations or working with outside counsel on fraud allegations should take the lesson to heart: intent is proven with a complete record, and withholding unfavorable evidence from decision-makers, whether a grand jury or an audit committee, tends to collapse a case rather than strengthen it.
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