Trump vows to end mail-in voting. Instead of parroting him, Lombardo should’ve told him to stuff it.

Gov. Joe Lombardo has a responsibility to his state to tell Trump to back the hell off. (Photo: Hugh Jackson/Nevada Current)

Last year nearly half of all Nevada voters cast their ballots by mail. In the 2022 general election, it was a little more than half. Voting by mail is popular in Nevada.

Donald Trump is promising to kill it. 

Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo is also not a fan. One of his first proposals as a new governor in 2023 was to get rid of universal mail-in voting. Like the overwhelming majority of legislation and initiatives Lombardo has proposed as governor, it didn’t go anywhere.

Now, disturbingly but predictably, and perhaps thoughtlessly, Lombardo is gushing over Trump’s war on mail ballots, telling the Review-Journal that he thinks Trump’s executive assault on the laws of Lombardo’s state is just swell. 

From Russia, with malice

As with many issues — TikTok, cryptocurrency, Yucca Mountain, Jeffrey Epstein, etc. — Trump has adjusted his position on mail-in voting in accordance with his situational interest.

But mostly he’s been against it, in a rabid sort of way. He’s conjured up fantasies about make-believe mail voter fraud, part of his long-running campaign to bury democracy under the stench-ridden torrent of fraud and deceit gushing from his own mouth.

Monday morning he belted out an unhinged lie-laced social media post declaring jihad on mail-in voting.

Trump claims the diatribe was prompted by his role model, Vladimir Putin. Trump confided to one of his publicists at Fox News last week that while Trump was lovingly getting lost in Putin’s soulless, murdering eyes in Alaska, Putin, according to Trump, told Trump the 2020 election was “rigged because you have mail-in voting.”

Putin, Trump continued, told him “no country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.”

“And he said that to me,” Trump humblebragged, so proud that Putin has once again taken him under his wing. “And it was very interesting, because we talked about 2020, and he said ‘you won that election by so much.’” 

Second-guessing Putin on questions of democracy should be done with care; nobody could subjugate and vulgarize democracy in such a corrupt, vile and violent fashion, as Putin has (and Trump is in the process of doing), if they didn’t know at least a little something about it, right?

And yet Putin’s gospel rendered unto his worshiping acolyte notwithstanding, as it happens, the U.S. is not, in fact, alone. A dozen countries let all voters cast their ballot through the mail, and another 22 have varied degrees of mail voting.

Speaking of facts, and the malignant disregard in which Trump holds them, in his social media flameout, Trump asserted: “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.” 

As approximately … hmm … let’s see … oh that’s right … ALL the nation’s constitutional scholars have observed at some point since Trump busted out that pseudo-proclamation all Queen of Hearts like, he’s so full of it.

Article 1, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution states:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators. 

There’s no mention of the president having jack doodley squat to do with that. Not even if the president is Trump.

The twisted vulgarity of Trump’s assertion was underscored, albeit politely, in a statement posted Monday by Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, who also serves as the state’s chief election official (Utah is one of the few states where, unlike Nevada, the office of lieutenant governor is an actual job).

“The constitutional right of individual states to choose the manner in which they conduct secure elections is a fundamental strength of our system,” said Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson.

Utah started sending mail ballots to voters in counties more than a decade ago and eventually adopted the practice statewide. There, like in Nevada, it’s been really popular, though MAGAUtahans enacted a bill earlier this year to phase out universal mail ballots by 2029 anyway. 

But that’s not the point. 

The point — the Utah Republican lieutenant governor’s point — is that no matter how many phony allegations of fraud Trump screeches or how achingly he yearns to render elections obsolete, Trump can’t rewrite state election procedures by edict, because doing that is unconstitutional as hell.

Area man misses the point

Which brings us back to Lombardo. He doesn’t like the idea of sending ballots to all voters. Fine. If he wins reelection and gets to be governor again during a regular legislative session, he’s totally free to once again ask legislators to make it stop.

Similarly, if Lombardo would like to publicly urge Trump to order the Republican controlled Congress to pass legislation to “alter” (as Article 1 puts it) state legislative authority over election proceedings, that’d be a squirrelly request for the leader of any state to make, but at least it would be advising a course that’s more or less within the law.

But no matter what Lombardo thinks about the merits or faults of sending ballots to all voters, that’s the law in his state now, the U.S. Constitution leaves election procedures to his state, and as governor, Lombardo has a responsibility to his state to tell Trump to back the hell off. Whether he’s shirking that responsibility out of ignorance of the Constitution or fear of Trump doesn’t matter, the result is the same either way: Lombardo is facilitating the nation’s deterioration into autocracy.

One of the more insidious markers along the fast path to autocracy in the U.S. over the last six months has been the pattern where Trump does some unconstitutional thing, one or more federal courts say yup, that’s unconstitutional, and then the obsequious Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court goes way out of its way to find some futzy and overwrought quasi-rationalization to send it back to lower courts, while allowing Trump to continue doing whatever unconstitutional thing he’s doing for the foreseeable future.

That might be what happens with his lawless assault on states’ rights as enumerated in the Constitution to run their own elections, especially if Republican governors zip their lips and sit on their hands, perhaps hoping that one of these days all the Trump chaos will somehow magically disappear.

Alas, preventing and reversing the U.S. disintegration into autocracy isn’t just going to happen on its own. It will depend on people who will defend the rule of law and stand up to Trump. You can count Lombardo out.