Jim Marchant is a proud election denier — and he wants to upend Nevada's voting system because he views it as a corrupt process infecting the state and nation.
Marchant is also the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Nevada's 2026 general election.
In addition to the relatively boring area of business licensing, the position oversees elections.
"It's a badge of honor for me," he said of some calling him an election denier. "But I have a label for them — they're election-fraud deniers."
Those who mock his election conspiracy beliefs are out of step with most Americans, who have concerns about the election system, he said.
"Nobody," Marchant said, "has confidence in our election system nationwide."
A March 2026 Marist poll asked about 1,600 representative American adults, mostly registered voters, whether they think "voter fraud" will happen during this year's election. The phrase was not defined. About 50% said it was likely and about 50% said it wasn't.
The same survey found that 66% believed their own state and local governments would run fair and accurate elections, down from 76% in 2024.
Marchant faces incumbent Democrat Cisco Aguilar in Nevada's race to be the state's next top election official. If Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo has a good showing in his reelection bid, Marchant could ride in on his coattails.
It'll be tough for Marchant to win for at least two reasons: a lack of money and a lack of support from some in his own party.
As of their last election finance filings in July, Aguilar has just over $1 million in his campaign and Marchant just under $14.
The difference doesn't faze Marchant, who puts in long hours and many miles relentlessly campaigning. Shirley Folkins-Roberts, Marchant's main Republican primary opponent, raised more than 400 times what he did and he still won.
Donors who normally back Republican candidates have steered clear of Marchant, and few top Republican elected officials in Nevada have endorsed him.
"I'm outside the establishment," Marchant said. "Democrats certainly don't like me, and the establishment Republicans don't like me, either."
Bruce Parks, chair of the Washoe County Republican Party, said his organization 100% endorses Marchant.
"The reason the establishment Republicans don't support him is because he questions the validity of previous elections," Parks said, "and they don't like that because they think it drives people away from the polls."
But he noted that those Republican establishment types endorsed rancher and longtime legislator James Settelmeyer over President Donald Trump's choice in newcomer David Flippo in the 2nd Congressional District primary.
"How'd that work out for them?" he asked.
Flippo won by 12 percentage points.
"Rank-and-file Republicans are behind Jim Marchant," Parks added.
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If he wins in November, Marchant wants to basically gut Nevada's election system and start over, literally.
All-new voter rolls: He calls for kicking every single voter off Nevada's voter rolls and having them reregister with "full oversight by the secretary of state," according to his campaign website.
Paper ballots: He would eliminate electronic voting machines and use paper ballots instead.
Hand counting: He would require that all votes be counted by hand.
Voter ID: Voters would need to present photo identification to vote — "including proof of citizenship," his website says.
Mail ballots: He would end the practice of mailing ballots to every voter unless they opt out.
Marchant thinks there are loopholes he can use if elected to get past restrictions on what the secretary of state can do.
Nevada law "says that I 'may' use voting machines," he said. "It doesn't say I 'shall.' So I want to look at that heavily and see if I can eliminate the voting machines once I get in.
"If I can't, I can darn sure have a parallel hand-count system alongside the machines to guarantee that the machines are going to do the right thing."
Aguilar, Nevada's current secretary of state seeking reelection, has long defended Nevada's voting system, saying the state "has proven time and time again that it runs some of the safest, most secure and accessible elections in the country."
He testified before the 2023 Nevada Legislature about allegations of voter fraud: "If there is even a single case of potential fraud identified, we conduct an investigation and, if necessary, refer it for criminal prosecution."
For the 2024 election, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked Nevada second best in the nation after Minnesota on its election performance index, which, among other things, looks at "electoral infrastructure and general administration."
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Marchant first started having concerns about the voting system in 2010 when incumbent U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, was 4 points behind Republican challenger Sharron Angle in a Las Vegas Review-Journal poll a week before the election.
He commented to fellow dirt bike riders during an outing in the desert that it looked like Angle would win.
"One guy piped up and he says, 'I'll bet you any amount of money you want that Harry Reid's gonna win this election,'" Marchant said. "I said, 'How can you be so sure?' He said, 'Who do you think controls the election machine?'"
Reid ended up winning by 5.6 points, a nearly 10-point swing.
Angle's loss could say more about the problems with polling than with the election system, but for Marchant, a light bulb went off about claims of election fraud: "I said, holy cow, there is something to this."
Since then, he's been collecting documents and other information from numerous elections where he thinks serious problems occurred.
Evidence of widespread election fraud has been the subject of dozens of lawsuits nationally, and so far, courts have rejected them all.
"My point is the whole judicial system is bad," Marchant said.
When asked if corruption infects the entire judicial system, he responded, "Yes."
The Nevada Secretary of State's office looked at almost 123,000 records and spent 125 hours of staff time investigating voter fraud in the 2020 election. It concluded there was no "evidentiary support for the contention that the 2020 general election was plagued by widespread voter fraud."
At the time, the office was run by Barbara Cegavske, a Republican.
"She's an election-fraud denier," Marchant said. "She actually didn't really understand how it works, and she's relying on other people to do it. That's what happens when you really don't understand your job."
Marchant said he's been working with Tina Peters, a former Colorado election official who was convicted of tampering with voting machines in her efforts to prove the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump.
Trump symbolically pardoned her even though she didn't face federal charges, and Colorado's Democratic governor commuted her nine-year sentence.
Voting machines can be manipulated, Marchant said.
"We actually extracted three programmers out of Venezuela and they're on our team now," he said. "We know exactly how they do it. Of course, I'm not going to tell you, but we know exactly how they do it."
As for the mountains of evidence of alleged voter fraud he's compiled, Marchant said it's now in the hands of the Trump administration, specifically the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
"They have it all, and it's being worked on," he said.
The Reno Gazette Journal has contacted the National Intelligence office for confirmation it's working on Marchant's evidence.
If Trump's efforts to restrict mail ballots, remove noncitizens from voter rolls and add voter ID restrictions ahead of the November election are successful, Marchant said he has a chance of winning. If not, he said, he probably won't.
"I'm still a staunch — what do you call it? Election denier? — I'm still a staunch election denier," he said.
Mark Robison is the politics & government reporter for the Reno Gazette Journal. Email comments to [email protected] or comment on Mark's Greater Reno Facebook page.
This article originally appeared on Reno Gazette Journal: Republican candidate Jim Marchant's dream — tear up Nevada vote system