Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!
We don’t yet have official results for Nevada’s secretary of state primary this week — officials are still counting ballots. But it appears that longtime election denier Jim Marchant — a GOP candidate and a major election conspiracy theorist who unsuccessfully ran for the same position back in 2022 — has a good chance of winning and, ominously, could actually be on a path toward becoming the chief election official in Nevada.
Let me jog your memory because Marchant’s election denial history goes back a few years.
Since 2020 Marchant has consistently and baselessly claimed that the 2020 election was stolen — from him and from President Trump. Marchant ran for a U.S. House seat in 2020 and lost. He has been maintaining his claims of a rigged election, and running for various elected offices on a campaign of election denialism, ever since.
In 2022, Marchant, who is a former state legislator, was the GOP nominee for Nevada secretary of state and was the founding member of the America First Secretary of State Coalition — a cohort of Big Liars running for secretary of state positions in the aftermath of the 2020 election on a platform of overturning the 2020 results.
He ultimately lost to Democrat Cisco Aguilar. At the time, he told NBC News that it is “almost statistically impossible that Joe Biden won [Nevada],” and that if he was secretary of state, he would not have certified the election results. He ran in the Republican primaries for Jacky Rosen’s Senate seat in 2024, placing third. Now, throwing his hat back in the ring for the secretary of state race again this year, he may finally be on the verge of a primary victory.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Marchant, who has ties to QAnon, was also at the helm of a conspiracy theory-fueled effort in Nye County to get rid of voting machines and move to a hand-counting ballot system — a system that is both inefficient and error-prone, but one that gained popularity among Big Lie enthusiasts post-2020 as Trump’s supporters spread lies about hacked voting machines.
As always, there’s a lot more to unpack this week. Let’s dig in.
The Big Lie: 2026 Edition
In some very on brand news… President Trump has begun spreading the 2026 edition of the Big Lie, following pretty much the same script as the 2020 version.
Trump stormed out of a “Meet the Press” interview that aired Sunday after NBC’s Kristen Welker pushed back on Trump’s comments about California’s “rigged” elections.
Trump repeated some familiar (and completely baseless) claims about the 2020 election during the interview, and then specifically claimed that California’s primary election is being rigged because the state is still counting ballots in a few key races — something that is both expected and normal in a large state like California.
“The election was rigged, it was a dirty election,” Trump said. “And it’s happening again right now in California.”
Trump claimed, without any evidence, that Republican candidates “are dropping fast because it’s a rigged election.”
The vote counting process in California can be especially time consuming due to the size of the state and the sheer volume of mail-in ballots it receives.
California has the biggest electorate in the country with over 23 million registered voters and it’s one of eight states that has universal mail-in voting. This means that all voters automatically receive mail-in ballots, which is why over 80 percent of California ballots are usually cast by mail. Election officials also must verify the signatures on mail-in ballots before they are processed.
“Some ballots will take counties up to 30 days to count every valid ballot and conduct a post-election audit,” California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said in a statement last week, confirming that the state’s process would indeed take some time. “California elections officials prioritize the right to vote and election security over rushing the vote count. We have a process that by law ensures both voting rights and the integrity of elections, so I would call on all Californians to be patient.”
Of course, though, the explanation of this process did not (and never does!) stop Trump and his allies from spreading lies about last week’s primary election in California.
“Four days and they aren’t even close to coming up with… You know why they are doing that? Because they are cheating on the election,” he added.
After Welker asked Trump for evidence for his claims, he simply said: “They’re crooked just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked. And ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked.”
“You play right into their hands with this stuff. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged,” he added, before ending the interview.
Trump has similarly been vocal on Truth Social, alleging rampant fraud in California simply because the results of the election have shifted as … more ballots are counted.
“There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY??? President DJT,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week.
Following these baseless claims of fraud, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli, who is a Trump appointee, announced on Friday, that his office has opened “multiple election fraud investigations” and that the state’s elections have “serious structural vulnerabilities.”
Essayli is also now calling out California officials for not handing over its voter rolls to the DOJ, a federal overreach that most other states have resisted and fought in court.
“For over a year, the Department of Justice has been trying to audit California’s voter rolls,” he wrote on X this week. “Federal law gives the Attorney General the authority to review state voter files and confirm that only eligible U.S. citizens are voting in federal elections.”
Senate Dems are Sounding Alarm on Trump Admin’s Election Interference
A group of Democratic senators is calling out the DOJ’s “quiet removal” of a long-standing 281-page guide for the prosecution of election-related crimes from its website.
In a letter this week to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Sens. Alex Padilla (D-CA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and 21 other Senate Democrats, sounded “the alarm” on the administration’s continued attempts to interfere in the midterm elections.
The letter comes in response to recent reporting from NOTUS, which documented the various ways the DOJ has failed to take steps to protect the 2026 midterm elections, including the removal of the long-standing Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses from the DOJ’s website. The now-deleted manual stated that DOJ prosecutors shouldn’t seize voting materials until after an election has been certified, as the senators point out in their letter.
NOTUS also reported that the DOJ has gotten rid of election-integrity training for prosecutors and FBI agents, fired most of the lawyers in the Public Integrity Section, and has not established a “command center” to address election-related emergencies ahead of the midterm elections.
“…the removal of this manual continues to raise the alarm about DOJ’s involvement in the upcoming midterm elections for partisan political purposes,” the letter reads. “We urge you to confirm the Department’s adherence to the principles outlined in the manual and be transparent about what, if any, changes the Department is making to this longstanding policy to protect elections from political interference.”
The letter also mentions the DOJ’s floundering campaign to seize sensitive voter information from 44 states and Washington D.C., and how that campaign may set the “pretext for more meritless pre- and post-election challenges, including interfering with election certification.”
“To be clear, any attempts by DOJ to file lawsuits to stop eligible voters from voting, their votes from being counted, or elections from being certified, will fail, but any attempts are still corrosive to public trust and confidence in our election administration and invite threats against nonpartisan election workers,” the senators wrote.
MAGA Georgia Election Board Shakeup
One of Georgia’s MAGA state election board members, Janice Johnston — who Donald Trump once referred to as a pitbull “fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” — resigned last week citing personal reasons.
“While I may be leaving the board, I’m not leaving the cause,”Johnston, who was appointed to the board in 2022, said last week. “My commitment to election integrity remains as strong as ever and I’ll continue supporting efforts that strengthen confidence, transparency and trust in our elections.”
Johnston, along with fellow MAGA-aligned board members Janelle King and Rick Jaffares, approved an extremely problematic rule in 2024 that gave county officials new authority over election administration. It also gave the board the ability to delay election certification until a “reasonable inquiry” into any discrepancies in the voting process had been conducted.
The issue with the rules is that the “reasonable inquiry” language was incredibly vague, and designed to give the board more power than it should have over when an election is certified, as previously reported by TPM.
The board, per state law, is only meant to play a ministerial role in the election certification process, making this election rule especially problematic. In June 2025, the Georgia State Supreme Court rejected this rule and others, saying that the board exceeded its authority in approving the changes.
And, more recently, we learned that Johnston actually played a role in the FBI’s raid in Fulton County, Georgia as it seeks to investigate the 2020 election, per reporting from AJC.
For many years, Johnston has baselessly claimed there was voter fraud in the 2020 election and has called for the dismissal of the Fulton County elections director.
Johnston will be replaced by Carolyn Roddy, who was nominated by the Georgia Republican Party.
In Other Election News
Democracy Docket: ‘This is chaos’: Maricopa County election-denier official accused of seizing election equipment, ballots
Democracy Docket: Florida Supreme Court greenlights GOP gerrymander that violates state ban
This is one of President Biden’s biggest blunders, not getting DeJoy out of the Postal Service and getting a board that believed in and supported elections and democracy.
The USPS is a tool of the Constitution of the United States of America, not some idiot tool of billionaires and his own fantasies of his greatness. Biden should have been using it to strengthen our Country, not leave it in the hands of some repulsive creep, or leave it floating around available to use or abuse depending on who grabs it.
Who is on the Board these days, the USPS seems to be acting awfully helpful to the oathbreaking traitor?
Democrats have to use all the tools available, all of them, if not just to deny them to trump and the gop. There’s more of us than there are of them, every way we can oppose them and favor us, the better.
Anyone who wants to know why the Republicans are so hot about 'rigged"elections? It’s because they know the 2000 election in Florida that gave Geoge W Bush the win, was rigged by them. Just saying!
Merchant could win, but my guess is that the incumbent Democrat will win. I say that as a transplanted New Yorker who’s lived in Northern Nevada for 16 years.
You just know from looking at him you’d need to don a full HAZMAT suit to examine Marchant’s text messages.