Clark County District Judge Mary Kay Holthus dismissed forgery charges Thursday against six Nevada Republicans who signed a certificate declaring Donald Trump the winner of a state he lost by more than 33,000 votes.
Her reasoning is the part worth sitting with: the signers announced the whole thing publicly, and in Holthus’s reading, that openness is evidence they were not trying to defraud anyone.
That logic now stands as the closest thing to a settled national answer on the 2020 alternate-elector slates, and it arrived without a single jury ever hearing the facts.
What Holthus Actually Ruled
Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford charged the six in December 2023 with forgery and offering a false instrument for filing or record, over a certificate sent to the National Archives and to Congress asserting that Trump had carried Nevada. The defendants included Michael McDonald, who still chairs the Nevada Republican Party, and Jesse Law, the former Clark County GOP chair. All pleaded not guilty.
Holthus found two separate problems with the state’s case. The first was intent. As CNN reported on Thursday, she concluded prosecutors had not shown the signers meant to deceive government officials. The second was procedural: she determined the state failed to disclose exculpatory evidence to the grand jury that indicted them, which is the kind of finding that poisons an indictment regardless of what the underlying conduct looked like.
“The fact that Defendants openly announced both their actions and their asserted purpose, rather than concealing their conduct or attempting to secretly induce governmental reliance, weighs against a reasonable inference that they acted with fraudulent intent.”
Read that sentence twice. It converts a press conference into a legal shield. The Nevada signers held their ceremony in the open, said out loud what the certificate was for, and that publicity is now the fact that defeats the fraud element. A quieter, more furtive version of the same scheme would have been easier to prosecute.
The Openness Defense Has Now Worked Four Times
Nevada is not an outlier. It is the fourth state where a fake-elector prosecution has collapsed. Arizona, Michigan and Georgia all saw their cases fall apart on some combination of venue, procedure, prosecutorial conduct and proof of intent, and NBC News framed Thursday’s ruling as the latest setback in what was once a coordinated multistate effort. Only Wisconsin’s case is still moving.
We covered the front end of that effort when it looked like the opposite story. In 2023, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel charged sixteen people in that state’s fake-electors scheme, and Georgia prosecutors extracted guilty pleas from Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, the lawyer who drafted the memos that made the alternate-slate strategy operational in the first place. Those were the high-water marks. Almost everything since has run the other direction.
The structural reason is not judicial sympathy for Trump. It is that state forgery and false-instrument statutes were written for people who fake deeds and checks, not for people who mail a contested political document to Congress with their names on it and a press release attached. Prosecutors reached for the tools they had. The tools did not fit, and four judges in four states have now said so in four different ways.
Ford Says He Will Appeal, and He Has Been Here Before
Ford’s office announced it will take the ruling to the Nevada Supreme Court, which is not a bluff. It worked last time.
This is Holthus’s second dismissal of the same case. In 2024 she tossed it on venue grounds, holding that Clark County was the wrong place to try conduct that touched Carson City and Washington. The Nevada Supreme Court overruled her and sent it back south, which is how the case survived to reach this week. The Nevada Independent noted that she has now dismissed it twice on entirely different grounds, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that her core finding this round was simple insufficiency of proof.
An appeal on a venue question is a clean legal issue an appellate court can fix. An appeal on whether the state proved intent, tangled up with a grand-jury disclosure failure, is a much harder climb, and it will take years the calendar does not really have. Nevada’s statute of limitations does not pause for an appellate docket.
The Precedent That Actually Matters Is the Next Certificate
The retrospective question, whether these six men belong in a courtroom over 2020, is close to spent. The prospective one is not.
What the last three years established is that submitting a competing slate of electors carries, in practice, almost no criminal risk if you do it loudly. State charges have failed. Federal charges against the architects evaporated. What remains is the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which raised the threshold for congressional objections and clarified the vice president’s role as purely ministerial, and that law is now doing nearly all the load-bearing work by itself. NPR’s account of the dismissal is a reminder of how much weight one statute is carrying.
Deterrence was supposed to be the other half. The theory was that anyone tempted to sign a false certificate in 2028 would remember what happened to the people who signed one in 2020. What happened to them, in four of five states, is nothing.
Holthus may well be right on the law as written. That is the uncomfortable part. If a scheme is lawful precisely because it was conducted in public, then the fix is not another prosecution built on a forgery statute from a different era. It is a legislature deciding whether submitting a knowingly false slate of electors should be its own crime, with its own elements, before the next contested count rather than after it. Nevada’s lawmakers convene again in 2027.