Mother Jones reports:

On March 19, Staci Lindberg, the elected clerk of Nevada’s Lyon County, was hit with some unsettling news: She was being sued for the first time in her life. The plaintiff? Her own political party.

The Republican National Committee had filed a lawsuit against Lindberg and five other Nevada election officials, alleging they had failed to follow a 1993 federal law requiring they maintain accurate voter registration rolls. As evidence, the RNC pointed to three counties it claimed had more people on their rolls than voting-age residents.

Lindberg, who in 2022 campaigned for the clerk position as a “patriotic, hardworking, conservative Christian,” says she was “shocked” by the accusation. The RNC hadn’t even inquired about her voter roll maintenance processes before wielding such a serious allegation. “It hurt my feelings,” Lindberg, a soft-spoken grandmother of nine, told me. And she notes: “I truly feel we’re one of the most secure and safest counties when it comes to election integrity.”

Lindberg shouldn’t take the lawsuit too personally. Three of the other election officials sued alongside her were also Republicans. One, Jim Hindle, was such a Donald Trump diehard in 2020 that he was indicted last December for serving as one of Nevada’s fake Trump electors. (The case was dismissed; Hindle declined to comment.) Lindberg and her fellow Republican clerks are just collateral damage in an aggressive and far-flung RNC strategy to contest the 2024 election before a single vote has been cast.

In Lyon County—which is located in western Nevada and has not favored a Democrat for president since FDR—the RNC initially asserted that 105 percent of voting-eligible residents were registered, an “impossibly high” percentage, suggesting “an ongoing, systemic problem with its voter list maintenance efforts.” The RNC made similar claims for nearby Douglas (104 percent) and Storey (113 percent) counties.

More curious than these alarming numbers—and the implications of voter fraud—was how the party came up with them. To estimate registration rates in each county, the RNC compared voter data from the secretary of state to a US census dataset that averaged populations over five years. The census data does not account for the tens of thousands of people who migrated to Nevada during the pandemic. More crucially, it often misses people who are lawfully registered to vote but temporarily residing elsewhere—such as college students and military service members. The RNC’s lawyers also, at one point, projected what they thought Nevada’s voting registration should be by extrapolating from a census survey of 54,000 Americans nationwide, not Nevadans specifically.

“They take one measure of one thing in one place, purport to compare it with another measure of another thing in a different place, and arrive at a conclusion that does not follow,” says Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and former adviser in the Biden administration. “It’s a little bit like saying, ‘My clock doesn’t match my thermometer, so that means I need to fill up my car.’” Or as Laena St-Jules, Nevada’s senior deputy attorney general, put it in a letter responding to the RNC’s allegations: “This is comparing apples to orangutans.” [Continue reading…]