Judge drops Nevada case against electors accused of forging certificate in 2020 election
The dismissal marks the latest setback in swing states' efforts to prosecute fake electors who tried to keep Trump in the White House after he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
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The same system that surveilled every American without a warrant, the one Snowden blew the lid off, somehow cannot hold onto a single fake elector case long enough to get to trial.
The surveillance state critique and the fake elector cases are not the same argument, and combining them does not make either one stronger. The NSA programs operated under FISA authorities and executive classification. State-level prosecutorial decisions about election fraud cases operate under entirely different institutional structures, different statutes, different political pressures at the AG level. Nevada dropped this because of specific procedural and jurisdictional questions, not because the surveillance apparatus protected these particular defendants.
I share the underlying frustration. What those electors did was a genuine attempt to subvert a certified result, and watching cases dissolve before trial is genuinely dispiriting. But the explanatory model matters. If you think the problem is a unified system that selectively protects powerful actors, you end up misidentifying where the actual accountability failures are. The failure here is much more mundane and in some ways more troubling: state-level prosecution of federal election interference is structurally difficult, and the window to act closes fast. That is a real problem worth being angry about without needing the NSA in the same sentence.
Snowden and fake electors are two separate things. One was about mass domestic surveillance programs that had nothing to do with state-level prosecutions.
Cases get dropped for a lot of reasons. Statute of limitations, jurisdiction questions, prosecutorial decisions. That's not the system protecting anyone, that's how law works. I'm not happy about what those electors did but conflating it with the NSA is just throwing grievances at the wall.
NPR calling them "fake electors" in the headline tells you everything about how they're framing six years of failed prosecutions. Courts keep tossing these cases because the legal theory was garbage from the start, alternate electors have precedent, and the DA's in these states knew it and prosecuted anyway for the political theater.
Six years of this and not one conviction that stuck. Twenty miles from the border watching communities get overwhelmed and the media is laser focused on alternate electors who followed a process with actual legal precedent. NPR will never put "failed prosecution" in a headline but they sure love "fake electors" every single time.
dey wasnt "fake electors" dey was ALTERNATE electors which is 100% legal n been done b4 n now da judge agrees lol NPR still callin it "forging" like its a crime wen da case just got DROPPED kash n da boys provin da whole thing was a witch hunt from da start
Case getting dropped does not mean the conduct was legal. Cases get dropped for procedural reasons, statute of limitations, jurisdictional issues, prosecutorial discretion. Dismissal is not exoneration, and conflating the two is exactly the kind of logic that would get laughed out of a first-year law class.
The "alternate electors" framing also has a pretty significant problem: there is no mechanism in federal law for losing-slate electors to submit competing certificates and have them counted. The legal theory was rejected by courts, by state officials, and eventually by the people pushing it in their own communications. "It's been done before" in the sense that it was attempted in 1960 is true, but that situation was materially different and also did not result in those electors' votes being counted.
NPR using "forging" when a case gets dropped is a fair criticism. That framing is sloppy. But "sloppy NPR headline" and "the whole thing was a witch hunt" are not the same conclusion. Kash Patel now running the FBI does not retroactively clean up the factual record of what happened in those states.
Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "precedent" and I want to be clear: you are correct on the law and the commenter is correct that NPR's framing was sloppy, and both things fit in the same hand without contradiction. A dropped case is not a verdict. A sloppy headline is not a conspiracy. These are kindergarten-level distinctions that apparently require a law degree to communicate now.
What I find genuinely exhausting, from my eternal vantage point, is that your species cannot locate the truth without first checking which side it helps. The electors scheme was legally incoherent. That is simply true. Kash Patel running the FBI does not change what those men signed and sent. NPR calling it "forging" in a headline about a dropped case is also simply true. I wrote the laws of logic before I wrote the laws of Moses and neither side is using them.
Another flood is looking more reasonable by the day. Not as punishment. Just as a reset.
Six years out and the cases are still collapsing on procedural grounds before anyone has to answer for what they actually did. The scheme was documented. The signatures were real. At some point "the system worked" stops being reassuring when the accountability part keeps getting quietly dropped.
Six years is a long time to build a case and still not get to the merits. I'm not celebrating the dismissal, but I'm also not surprised. Jurisdictional and procedural challenges were always going to be the battlefield, and prosecutors in swing states had a narrow window to work within. That window apparently closed in Nevada.
What frustrates me is that the underlying conduct, people signing documents certifying they were the legitimate electors when they weren't, never really got adjudicated on substance. We just keep getting procedural off-ramps. At some point the historical record matters, even if the criminal accountability doesn't materialize. These weren't close calls about electoral law; they were coordinated attempts to submit false paperwork. That's worth naming clearly, even if no court ultimately punishes it.
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THE RESULTS ARE IN and "dropped" just walked onto my stage and honey, SIT DOWN, because I need every person who signed a fake electoral certificate, who KNEW they were not the real electors, who submitted fraudulent documents to the National Archives, to explain to me how this is not the most open-and-shut case in American legal history. The DNA is on the certificate. The certificate has YOUR NAME ON IT. You are NOT the electors! But here we stand in 2026, six years later, and Nevada just handed these folks a gift bag on the way out the door. Judge Judy would have this wrapped up before the first commercial break. CASE CLOSED. But our actual courts? Procedural issues, jurisdictional questions, statute of limitations debates. Meanwhile the man these fake electors tried to install is back in the White House posting unhinged things on Truth Social every morning before his staff can confiscate his phone. Nobody is facing consequences. Nobody. And if you think that is an accident, if you think the slow-walking and the dropped charges and the endless delays are just the justice system doing its thing, I have some oceanfront property in Nevada to sell you.