(The Center Square) – A panel of three Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges dismissed a lawsuit seeking to overturn Nevada’s Election Worker Protection Act.
The case at the San Francisco-based court was brought by plaintiffs Robert Beadles, Alexandra Slack, Susan Vanness and Martin Waldman, who argued they could be wrongfully prosecuted for observing election officials during the 2020 presidential election.
The case, in which the plaintiffs argued the Election Worker Protection Act, or Senate Bill 406, would be used against them, was filed shortly after the law was unanimously passed by the Nevada Legislature in 2023.
SB 406 made it “unlawful for a person to use or threaten or attempt to use any force, intimidation, coercion, violence, restraint or undue influence with the intent to interfere,” against election workers in Nevada.
“I will always fight to protect election workers – they are the unsung heroes of our democracy. No one should be harassed or intimidated for supporting our democratic process, and this bipartisan law shows the importance of putting people over politics,” said Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, co-defendant in the case with Gov. Joe Lombardo, in a press release. “I’m thankful this case was dismissed and grateful to the Attorney General’s Office for standing with us in upholding the law and protecting our elections.”
The lawsuit, Vanness v. Aguilar, was largely based around a 2020 tweet by Attorney General Aaron Ford. In response to President Donald Trump’s push for supporters to monitor the election process “very carefully,” Ford said, “If you do it, you will be prosecuted.”
Plaintiffs Beadles, Slack, Vanness and Waldman argued the Democratic Nevada attorney general’s tweet was an enforcement threat.
The three judges denied the case primarily on the grounds that SB 406 was signed three years after the event, stating that Ford “at most threatened to prosecute voter intimidation.” The judges added that the plaintiffs did not provide any credible threat of enforcement.
The judges took additional issue with the case against SB 406 because the named defendants, Lombardo and Aguilar, have no authority to enforce the law.
“Election officials are in charge of some of the most critical operations of our democracy,” Ford said in the Secretary of State’s Office’s press release. “They deserve the fullest protection of the law, and I am happy that this lawsuit, which challenged those protections, has been dismissed.”
