VICTOR JOECKS: Gilbert’s crying wolf over election fraud distracts from valid concerns

If Joey Gilbert wanted to discredit legitimate concerns about voter fraud, it would have been hard to pick a better strategy than his current path.

Last month, Sheriff Joe Lombardo won the Republican gubernatorial nomination. That shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Lombardo was the front-runner for most of the race. A super PAC spent millions boosting him. Donald Trump endorsed him when the race tightened. Lombardo was well ahead in public polling.

This was so obvious that I wrote in January, “Lombardo looks almost unbeatable” in the primary. The prediction came true. Lombardo earned 38 percent of the Republican vote. Gilbert, a lawyer who fought coronavirus restrictions, ended up with 27 percent. Numerically, Lombardo won by around 26,000 votes. Lombardo cleaned up in Clark County, while Gilbert did better in rural Nevada. They were close in Washoe County, where Gilbert is from.

This voting breakdown was so predictable that even I saw it coming. Last December, I wrote that Gilbert’s “aggressive rhetoric” should help him “do especially well in rural Nevada.”

But Gilbert didn’t accept the results. He demanded a recount. His campaign insisted there were election violations. Gilbert claimed Nevada has “selections, not elections.” A lawsuit seems inevitable, especially after Clark County’s recount moved Gilbert just one vote closer to Lombardo.

At this point, Gilbert’s “evidence” seems to be that he thought he would win. But having the support of a couple of hundred people at a state GOP convention doesn’t mean you have broad support among voters. Neither does having the most passionate supporters — as Bernie Sanders could tell you.

Losing is not proof of voter fraud. Acting as if it is makes it easy for others to dismiss the many vulnerabilities in the system. Those weaknesses exist.

“Because we’re still new to mass mail-in ballots, these things will improve,” Clark County Registrar Joe Gloria said last month. “The mailing list will become cleaner, something which is difficult in a county as transient as Clark County.”

That is a tacit acknowledge that county officials are mailing ballots to addresses where voters no longer live. That’s a problem, especially when signature verification is a joke. In 2020, I had nine voters copy my version of their signature of their mail ballots. County officials accepted eight of them.

The secretary of state’s investigation of the 2020 election also found irregularities. This included people voting after filing a permanent change of address notice with the post office more than 30 days before the election. More than 4,000 people voted who had once used an immigration document at the DMV.

The secretary of state’s office then refused to investigate individual cases because it speculated there could be innocent explanations for each of those things. Ironically, that’s the inverse of what Gilbert is doing now.

Gilbert acts as if vulnerabilities prove fraud. Election officials refuse to thoroughly investigate vulnerabilities because there isn’t proof of widespread fraud.

The truth is between those two extremes. There are vulnerabilities in Nevada’s election system. That is a strong, supportable argument. But it’s undermined by Gilbert’s reckless rhetoric.

Contact Victor at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.