The Great Nevada Ballot Caper

A Comedy of Errors in Three Acts

Ah, my dear reader, let us wade through the murky waters of Nevada’s 2024 General Election lawsuit with a careful step, lest we slip upon the banana peels of bureaucratic folly and land squarely upon the hard pavement of misgovernance.

To commence, we gaze upon the grand spectacle of November 8, wherein Washoe and Clark Counties engaged in an arithmetic performance so bewildering that it would have made a Mississippi riverboat gambler blush. The tally of mailed ballots suffered a most curious evaporation—28,869 of them, to be precise—vanishing faster than a silver dollar in a con man’s hand.

With all the conviction of a schoolboy caught filching apples, the Secretary of State attributed this discrepancy to a “copy and paste” error by Clark County. Meanwhile, not to be outdone in the fine art of blame-shifting, Clark County declared the fault lay with the Secretary of State’s office. Thus, the affair was neatly settled, like a drunken brawl where both parties agreed it was the other fellow’s fault.

Then came November 11, a date destined to be remembered not for valor but for vexation, as the 41,489 counted mailed ballots, a most perplexing 39,935, had failed to mark a choice for President. Now, such restraint in voting would be commendable if we were discussing a church picnic’s potato sack race, but in a national election–it raises a question or two. Either the ballot scanning machines possessed the eyesight of a bat in daylight, or some unseen hand had meddled in the affairs of the Republic with the dexterity of a pickpocket at a county fair.

And then, as if to crown this majestic pyramid of confusion with a final absurdity, the Clark County Board of Commissioners, on November 15, declared all was well and certified the election results with the confidence of a man selling a wooden leg with a termite problem. But alas, the mirage did not last long, for by November 30, statistical analysis uncovered a curious symmetry betwixt votes for Trump and Harris, indicating that randomness—the very foundation of honest elections—had been cast aside like an old campaign poster. The ‘Cast Vote Record’ was molded into an unnatural shape, much like a fish tale that gets longer with each telling.

Now, the U.S. Constitution, in its wisdom, guarantees a Republican form of government, not a vaudeville act where votes appear and disappear with the caprice of a stage magician. The legitimacy of elections must rest upon a foundation as firm as the Rock of Gibraltar, not upon the shifting sands of bureaucratic incompetence and statistical curiosities. If the people of this Republic are to govern themselves, they must first trust that the vote they cast is the vote that counts, lest we find ourselves governed not by the will of the people but by the whims of those who count the ballots.