STEVE SEBELIUS: Election math shows Lombardo won

Joey Gilbert had a good run.

But that’s all over now.

A Carson City District Court judge granted summary judgment with prejudice Wednesday on a motion to dismiss Gilbert’s lawsuit contesting the results of the June 14 Republican gubernatorial primary, which he lost to Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo.

The numbers don’t lie: Lombardo got 87,761 votes, or 38.4 percent. Gilbert got 61,738 votes, or 27 percent. There were 15 candidates in the race, along with our old friend the noncorporeal None of These Candidates, which posted 1.85 percent.

That means Gilbert lost the election by 26,023 votes.

Remember those numbers. They will become important later on.

After a recount barely changed the final count, Gilbert filed his challenge. It was one of the most bizarre legal documents ever seen in an American courtroom.

“Based on a geometric mathematical analysis of the votes as counted and announced by the Counties in Nevada, Contestant Joey Gilbert disputes this alleged result,” Gilbert’s filing says. “Mr. Gilbert accepts the votes as counted. However, he will prove that the result as announced is a mathematical impossibility.”

“When the votes as counted and announced are statistically corrected, Mr. Gilbert will demonstrate with irrefutable geometric finality that he handily won the primary election for the Republican gubernatorial nominee in the June 14, 2022 Primary Election in Nevada.”

And not just won, won handily. The filing claims Gilbert won by more than 55,000 votes.

How? Well, math, you see. There are the Laws Which Govern the Proportions of Elements Between Four Pairwise Disjoint Sets, the Twenty Laws, the Forty Isometries, the elliptical cloud, the rotational matrix, the correlation coefficients and that leads to the Election Restoration Algorithm and extrapolation of polynominal fits.

It’s so obvious that the results were “not produced by accurate counting of the votes cast, but were instead artificially contrived according to a predetermined plan or algorithm.”

So who done it? “Contestant (Gilbert) does not allege who caused this to happen, when it happened or why it happened, only that it HAS HAPPENED. That is mathematically irrefutable.”

I’ve never been good with math, especially the kind of math that employs Greek symbols. I prefer simpler equations, such as this one: X equals Lombardo’s votes, Y equals Gilbert’s votes, and X is greater than Y, so Lombardo wins.

I’m better with political science, and one of the 99 Laws of Political Science tells us is that if the election was rigged, mathematically, geometrically or exponentially, and said fraudster was a Democrat, that person would have definitely rigged the election so that Gilbert would have won.

Why? Because Lombardo is demonstrably a far superior general election candidate than Gilbert could ever dream of being. Gilbert would have been much easier for incumbent Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak to defeat in a statewide election. You don’t even need one of the Forty Isometries to know that much.

For Gilbert — who has vowed never to concede his race and who has invoked God in his quest to overturn the primary results — it’s got to be hard. He traveled the state multiple times, held rallies with cheering supporters, got the endorsement of the Nevada Republican Party and went toe-to-toe with a popular sheriff — but came in second.

It happens. And it’s not a math problem, it’s a political problem: More Nevada Republicans wanted Lombardo than wanted Gilbert. That’s a cold fact, and one that almost anyone would have trouble accepting after a hard-fought campaign.

Even if you consider that, in the aggregate — 140,809 Republicans wanted somebody other than Lombardo (or nobody at all) — it doesn’t matter, because that’s not how elections work.

That’s why Judge James Wilson granted the motion for summary judgment, literally the fastest way a lawsuit can be dismissed. And it was dismissed with prejudice, which means it can’t be refiled in the future.

Gilbert shouldn’t be embarrassed at his political performance. He beat a former U.S. senator, the sitting mayor of the state’s fourth-largest city, a rich guy willing to dump a lot of money into a lost cause and a guy who’s been on more ballots in Nevada than the rest of the field combined (what’s up, Eddie Hamilton?!).

But Gilbert’s post-election legal behavior? That’s another matter entirely.

Gilbert had a good run. But that’s over now.

Contact Steve Sebelius at SSebelius@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0253. Follow @SteveSebelius on Twitter.