“Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

— UCLA Bruins football coach Henry Russell “Red” Sanders

Recently, Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen hosted several other Republican secretaries of state for a conference on “election integrity and security.”

Regarding the conference, Mr. Evnen said, “Election security is not static.… Election security is dynamic.”

That reminds me of 2020. After the November election, Secretary Evnen publicly acknowledged his support for Nebraska’s then-attorney general signing on to a federal lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. (Paxton was himself a defendant in a lengthy 2014 criminal trial and the subject of a later impeachment, which he survived.)

Paxton’s lawsuit, Texas v. Pennsylvania, was about “election integrity.” Filing directly with the Supreme Court, Paxton and the others sought to have votes in four swing states thrown out for reasons having to do with changes to those states’ election procedures necessitated by the 2020 pandemic. (No non-swing states were targeted by the lawsuit.)

Had it been successful, the suit would have resulted in Donald Trump being re-installed in the White House in 2021.

At the time, Secretary Evnen said he agreed with then-Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson, who told Nebraska Public Media that “Nebraskans — no less than citizens in other states — have a strong interest in ensuring that presidential elections comply with the Constitution.”

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case for lack of standing, which was the result that many pundits and most legal experts had expected for states trying to claim harm caused by election procedures employed in another state.

But I guess you can’t blame them for trying. Or can you? One observer back in 2020 was then-Nebraska State Sen. Adam Morfeld, who happens to also be one of the co-sponsors of the beleaguered 2024 medical marijuana petitions. He called the effort “disgusting … an affront to our democracy and a complete sham, according to Nebraska Public Media.

Here in October 2024, Nebraska state officials are still “dynamically” engaged in the election process. This time, Mr. Evnen and the current Nebraska attorney general are targeting voting rights for ex-felons and the two medical marijuana petitions on this year’s ballot.

Although the Legislature recently restored voting rights for ex-felons, Mr. Evnen, armed with one of Attorney General Mike Hilgers’ “non-binding opinions,” had decided not to honor that law for the 2024 cycle and was not allowing ex-felons to register.

But last week, the Nebraska Supreme Court rejected that notion, with one Justice writing, “Do we want to live in a world where every state employee who has a hunch a statute is flawed gets to ignore it?”

It’s a good question. Not long ago, Mr. Hilgers issued a “non-binding opinion” that resulted in the Nebraska Legislature’s Ombudsman’s Office being temporarily barred from investigating executive agencies under its purview. It was the opinion of Mr. Hilgers that the law authorizing the Ombudsman’s Office was not constitutional.

Also at the urging of Attorney General Mike Hilgers, Mr. Evnen is currently challenging in court nearly 100,000 signatures on the two medical marijuana petitions — signatures which his office had already certified as valid.

None of the other petitions for this cycle are being challenged by state officials.

It appears Mr. Hilgers — who has been on a monthslong personal quest to shut down legally operating Nebraska hemp dispensaries via a public shaming campaign and threatened lawsuits — has devised a novel way to challenge these two particular petitions’ signatures: He publicly questions their validity and announces a criminal investigation into some of the circulators and even one petition sponsor, Crista Eggers.

Now that strikes me as dynamic.

The result? In Nebraska, the people’s medical marijuana petitions are captured by the state’s courts and “tainted” (the attorney general’s word) with the state’s ongoing investigation. And it will stay that way until and unless petitioners somehow prove the already-validated signatures are still, in fact, valid.

Although no one is sure exactly what may be wrong with them.

Of one thing we can be sure: This strategy’s gambit of suspending the “presumed validity” of the petitions’ signatures during the election season is complex and growing costly for all parties, and it will continue until after many Nebraskans — perhaps all — have cast their votes. (I have already cast mine.)

But whatever the eventual outcome in the courts, I submit that this public legal challenge (without accompanying legal action) impugning the character of individuals involved in an ideologically polarizing petition, and its resulting “taint” being aired in the press as people are filling out their ballots, will change — has changed — the election’s outcome.

I’d definitely call that dynamic.

This story was published by Nebraska Examiner, an editorially independent newsroom providing a hard-hitting, daily flow of news. Read the original article: https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2024/10/24/when-protecting-elections-how-dynamic-is-too-dynamic/

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