Jury Duty
Plus: The facts about election security in Nevada. 🗳️
Published April 19, 2024
This Week in Democracy
- A jury of 12 everyday New Yorkers was seated for Donald Trump’s first criminal trial. They took an oath to deliver a fair and impartial verdict. Trump is accused of falsifying business records to hide damaging information from voters before the 2016 election.
- District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is prosecuting the New York case, asked Justice Juan Merchan to hold Trump in contempt for attacking witnesses on social media in violation of a court order. “Defendant is not above the law,” Bragg wrote.
- A judge upheld the $148 million defamation judgment against Rudy Giuliani for falsely accusing two Georgia election workers of fraud in 2020. The workers described suffering abuse and threats as a result of the false claims.
- Smartmatic, which makes voting equipment, settled a lawsuit against the far-right One America News Network. Smartmatic had alleged that OANN aired false claims linking the company to fraud in the 2020 election. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
State of the States
In Nevada, Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar reported “no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Nevada, at any point in our state’s history.” Aguilar’s office plans to release quarterly reports on election investigations to increase transparency about Nevada’s safe and secure elections. The first edition showed how rare voter fraud cases really are: In the 2020 and 2022 elections, the office referred a total of just 14 cases to the attorney general or other agencies for possible prosecution. For context, more than 1 million people voted in Nevada in the 2022 general election alone.
Recommended Reading
In an op-ed for The Dallas Morning News, States United Senior Counsel Gillian Feiner joins James C. Harrington and Lauren Stiller Rikleen to argue that the State Bar of Texas must open new disciplinary proceedings against Sidney Powell. Last October, Powell pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case to six counts of conspiracy arising from Trump’s attempt to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
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