Nevada Independent:

 A Clark County judge has dismissed the charges filed against the six Nevada Republicans who submitted an invalid slate of electoral votes for former President Donald Trump in 2020, ruling that the county was not the appropriate jurisdiction for the case. 

At a Friday morning hearing in Clark County District Court, Judge Mary Kay Holthus said she was unconvinced by state prosecutors’ arguments that Clark County was the appropriate county in which to hear the case. The electors’ attorneys had argued a more appropriate venue would be in Carson City, where the illegitimate signing ceremony took place, or in Douglas County, where the fake elector documents were originally mailed from. 

Clark County is more Democratic, meaning a jury could be less favorable to the Republican defendants.

“You have literally, in my opinion, a crime that has occurred in another jurisdiction,” Holthus said. “It’s so appropriately up north and so appropriately not here.”

Immediately after the ruling, Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said the “judge got it wrong” and that his office will appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court. A trial set for January has been vacated pending the high court’s ruling.

The state is unable to refile the case up north because a three-year statute of limitations expired in December.

WaPo:

Arizona delegates to the Republican National Convention gathered this month in a Phoenix suburb, showing up to get to know each other and learn about their duties.

Part of the presentation included a secret plan to throw the party’s nomination of Donald Trump for president into chaos.

The instructions did not come from “Never Trumpers” hoping to stop the party from nominating a felon when delegates gather in Milwaukee next month. They instead came from avowed “America First” believers hatching a challenge from the far right — a plot to release the delegates from their pledge to support Trump, according to people present and briefed on the meeting, slides from the presentation and private messages obtained by The Washington Post.

The delegates said the gambit would require support from several other state delegations, and it wasn’t clear whether those allies had been lined up. One idea, discussed as attendees ate finger foods, was for co-conspirators to signal their allegiance to one another by wearing matching black jackets.

The exact purpose of the maneuver was not clear — and left some delegates puzzled and alarmed. People familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said perhaps the intent was to block an undesirable running mate. Most of the dozen GOP officials or activists interviewed by The Post even ventured that the aim may have been to substitute former national security adviser Michael Flynn for Trump if the former president is sentenced to prison time. Among some on the far right, suspicions have intensified that the former president has surrounded himself with too many advisers beholden to the “deep state.”

New Common Ground Democracy essay with this subtitle: “The likelihood that extremist parties on the right and left will gain at the expense of the middle illustrates with hyper-polarization necessitates electoral reform.“

The essay begins: “France is facing a political crisis that it could have avoided if it had adopted an electoral system of the type advocated by its most prominent theorist of electoral system design, the eighteenth-century mathematician and philosopher Marquis de Condorcet.”

WaPo roundup.