Sixty percent of voters across the country will have candidates on their ballots who support former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. In Nevada, voters are being presented with an election denier in almost every race for a constitutional office, a few House races, and one Senate race. In Washoe County, many local races not only have election deniers running for office, they are being well funded by a millionaire conspiracy theorist who has dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into local and statewide races and successfully engaged in a hostile takeover of the Washoe County Republican Party.
As voting continues across Nevada, when and why should voters conclude that a candidate is not competent and is disqualified from public office? I don’t mean disagreements over policy. Rather, as a threshold question, are there words and/or actions so egregious that they are disqualifying, in themselves? And if so, is claiming that the 2020 election was stolen and voter fraud is rampant, when there is no evidence of that, one of them?
It is a question of character. There was a time in our political culture when considerations of the character of a candidate superseded party affiliation, at least most of the time. In the Republican party, for example, if it was discovered that a candidate committed an act of sexual assault, engaged in domestic violence, coerced a woman to get an abortion, was unfaithful to a spouse, engaged in shady business...
A federal jury has convicted a San Francisco man of conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering in connection with a scheme involving fraudulent insurance claims on already-wrecked vehicles, pros...