A Nevada judge on August 13 dismissed the criminal case against six Republicans accused of signing a certificate that falsely declared Donald Trump the winner of the state's 2020 electoral votes. District Judge Mary Kay Holthus threw out charges of forgery and 'offering a false instrument for filing or record,' finding that prosecutors had not shown the intent to deceive that those crimes require [1].
The ruling turned on how openly the defendants acted. '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,' Holthus wrote [1]. That is the core of the court's reasoning: a person who broadcasts what they are doing and why is not easily cast as trying to trick the government into relying on a forged document.
Holthus also found a separate defect in how the case was built. The state, she ruled, failed to disclose exculpatory evidence to the grand jury that returned the indictment [1]. According to PBS NewsHour, the six defendants included Nevada Republican Party chair Michael McDonald and former Clark County Republican Party chair Jesse Law [1].
Nevada is now the fourth state where criminal cases against 2020 fake electors have collapsed. Similar prosecutions have been dismissed in Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia [1].
The record here is not final. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford's office said it plans to appeal the ruling [1]. An appeal would test a narrow but consequential question: whether a coordinated effort to submit a false elector slate can be prosecuted as forgery when the people who signed it never concealed what they had done.
