Jim Marchant

James Carl Marchant Jr. (born May 28, 1956) is an American politician in Nevada.

Marchant was born on May 28, 1956, in Gainesville, Florida.

Marchant worked for the family business from 1978 until 1984, when he left to found his own business.

He graduated from Troy University with a degree in criminal justice, and moved to Nevada from Florida in 2005.

In 2015, Marchant threatened to run against then-Speaker John Hambrick; he ultimately decided to challenge Glenn E. Trowbridge instead.

Marchant defeated Trowbridge and then Democrat Sean D.. Lyttle in the general election.

A member of the Republican Party, he represented the 37th district in the Nevada Assembly, covering parts of the northwestern Las Vegas Valley, from 2016 to 2018.

In 2018, Marchant was unopposed in the Republican primary, but narrowly lost his re-election campaign for Assembly District 37 to Shea Backus, a Democrat, by a vote of 14,222 to 14,087.

A staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, Marchant was the Republican nominee for Nevada's 4th congressional district in 2020 and for Secretary of State of Nevada in 2022.

In 2020, Marchant lost his U.S. House election to Democrat Steven Horsford, while Trump lost his reelection bid in the concurrent presidential race.

In the aftermath of the election, Marchant became a staunch proponent of the disproven conspiracy theory that the election was "stolen" from Republicans through mass voter fraud.

He sued to have his own defeat overturned, and became actively involved in numerous unsuccessful efforts to send alternate electors to Washington and overturn the presidential election.

Marchant subsequently announced his candidacy for Nevada Secretary of State in 2022.

He was endorsed by far-right congressmen Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs of neighboring Arizona, as well as former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Marchant was the president of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, a group of Republican 2022 Secretary of State candidates supporting the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

He repeatedly said that he would not have certified President Joe Biden's victory in Nevada if he had been Secretary of State at the time of the election, and that he would consider doing the same in 2024 if Biden carried the state again.

He also tied himself closely to QAnon, a disproven far-right conspiracy theory, attending an October 2021 conference associated with the movement in Las Vegas.

Marchant lost the 2022 election to Democrat Cisco Aguilar.

Marchant is a candidate for the United States Senate in the 2024 United States Senate election in Nevada, currently held by incumbent Democrat Jacky Rosen.

Marchant ran for the U.S. House to represent Nevada's 4th congressional district in 2020.

He won the Republican Primary with 34.8% of the vote, but lost the general election against incumbent Democrat Steven Horsford by a margin of 50.7% to 45.8%.

After losing the election, he sued to have the result reversed, alleging voter fraud claims.

Marchant's request was denied by a Clark County District Court judge on November 20, 2020.

On his Nevada Secretary of State campaign website, Marchant claims he "was a victim of election fraud".

Jim Marchant was a candidate for Secretary of State of Nevada in the 2022 election.

Marchant had denied Biden's victory in the state in 2020, claiming that "It's almost statistically impossible that Joe Biden won."

In the aftermath of the 2020 United States presidential election, Marchant supported the Trump fake electors plot, the attempt by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the election result by sending fake electors from Nevada to vote for Trump in the Electoral College instead of the Democratic electors chosen by Nevada voters.

He said that if he is elected Secretary of State, he would also support the sending of fake electors from Nevada after the 2024 presidential election.

Marchant also stated that he would eliminate vote by mail, end early voting, and remove all electronic voting machines, which would be replaced by hand counting in a "traceable paper-ballot only" voting system.

He has advocated for decentralizing vote counting, and has actively sought to convince counties to eliminate the use of voting machines and to conduct all ballot counting by hand, which experts say will increase Human Error in the ballot counting process and make counting slower.

Marchant's promise to end voting by mail is based on the theory that voting by mail caused widespread voter fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election.

Moreover, Marchant's desire to replace voting machines with hand counts has its root in another theory that Dominion Voting Systems machines, in collaboration with deceased Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and billionaire philanthropist George Soros, switched votes from former President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden.

Marchant claims he only wishes to ban voting machines until they can be inspected for fraud.

Republican Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske's office reviewed voting machines and found it was "certain" that voting machines were not compromised.

Marchant also wanted to eliminate the use of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonprofit bipartisan organization which shares voter registration information between 33 member states in order to prevent individuals from registering to vote in multiple states.

After the 2020 United States presidential election, ERIC came under attack from conspiracy theorists who claimed without evidence that it was part of a left-wing conspiracy orchestrated by George Soros.

Some of Marchant's other policy proposals as they relate to elections were requiring government issued voter identification to vote, banning ballot drop boxes, and a nationwide audit of the 2020 United States presidential election.

An investigation by the Associated Press of potential voter fraud in six states disputed by former President Donald Trump and his legal team—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—found 475 potential voter fraud cases out of President Joe Biden's combined 311,257 vote victory margin in those six states.

Marchant also backed a proposal that would require everyone in Nevada to re-register to vote, citing fears of ineligible voters registered to vote.

Some voting rights advocates claim the proposal is an act of voter suppression since Southern segregationists in the Jim Crow South required people to re-register to vote in order to deny the vote to black Americans.