Marc Elias’ Firm Intervenes to Halt ‘Disastrous Election System’ Overhaul

Bogus Russian dossier peddler and Democrat Party problem fixer Marc Elias has again injected himself into a key election integrity case to “defend the broken status quo.”

Swing-state Nevada’s dirty voter rolls include hundreds of suspect addresses, at bars, strip clubs, empty parking lots, and other commercial addresses, according to an investigation by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Doing so is clearly against the law.

“In Nevada, by the state law, you are required to be registered where you actually live, where you sleep. Not where you work, not at a P.O. Box. So we’re trying to get elections officials to enforce the law,” Lauren Bis, PILF’s director of communication and engagement, says in a video tracking bad addresses in the Las Vegas area.

To that end, the foundation has filed a petition in Washoe County, Nevada’s second-most populous county, to force elections officials to investigate and fix commercial addresses on the voter roll. PILF investigators found addresses on the rolls reported as liquor stores, empty lots, and even the Nevada Gaming Control Board, among others.

Baseless Attacks?

Elias Law Group and a band of leftists have sought to intervene in PILF’s petition for a writ of mandamus, arguing that forcing Washoe election administrators to follow the law and clean up the county’s dirty voter rolls will “threaten” voting rights.

The would-be intervenors claim that their members and constituents would be forced to “expend substantial resources to educate voters and protect them from baseless attacks on their eligibility.”

Baseless attacks?

As The Federalist recently reported, Bis was greeted with a lot of quizzical looks from employees at the casinos, fast-food restaurants, retailers, post offices, funeral homes, strip clubs, tattoo parlors, and jails where registered voters — at least according to Nevada’s dirty voter rolls — “resided.” What PILF found was equal parts sad and hilarious, foundation President J. Christian Adams told me on “The Federalist Radio Hour.”

The election integrity public interest law firm tracked data from the Nevada secretary of state’s office, which in the 2022 midterm elections reported 95,556 ballots sent to undeliverable, or “bad,” addresses. PILF investigators documented commercial addresses purported to be the residences of registered voters, confirming on video that the individuals did not live where they reported residing.

“We’ve been to all of the locations. It’s not some data exercise we see sitting at a computer in Chicago. We’ve actually got boots on the ground looking for the voters, and they don’t exist,” Adams said.

‘Disastrous Elections System’

Making matters worse, Nevada automatically mails a ballot to every active registrant on the voter rolls.

“I’m looking for Ronald or William Phelps,” Bis says in the video to a bartender wearing a “Tacos por favor” T-shirt at a local watering hole on North Nellis Boulevard in Vegas.

“I don’t know who that is,” the barkeep replies.

“So, they don’t live here?” Bis asks.

“Uh, at the bar? No,” the bartender says, chuckling. She’s clearly amused by the question.

It’s almost as amusing as Elias and friends’ apparent efforts to stop election officials from following the law under the absurd premise of voter rights. Their court filing offers a dire warning about what will happen if Washoe County is required to do what PILF has done: Washoe County’s job.

“If the Court grants such relief, Respondent Burgess — and other clerks and registrars across the state — will be flooded with third-party demands to investigate all manner of alleged peculiarities in the voter rolls, based on unsourced, unverified, and unsworn information,” the court filing admonishes. “Petitioners are not the only ones making such demands. Nevada is in the midst of a storm of baseless efforts by third parties to force election officials to undertake a rushed purge of registered voters before the November election.”

Adams called Elias’ latest lawfare stunt a “cry wolf exercise.”

“He does this all over the country. He spools up these progressive astroturf organizations and they file a legal brief, which they have done in our case, which we have to respond to, that says, ‘Oh, if you listen to these evil conservatives, there will be eligible people improperly removed from the rolls.’ Nonsense,” said Adams, who formerly served in the Voting Section at the U.S. Department of Justice and was appointed to President Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

“Marc Elias is in the business of defending the riches of a disastrous elections system with universal vote-by-mail that are sending ballots automatically to thousands of bogus addresses,” Adams added.