Michael Lyle, Nevada Current

Though typically the idiom “second to none” is a compliment, for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, it means her third defeat in the Republican presidential nomination process. And a humiliating one.

With nearly half the statewide vote counted Tuesday night, Haley was trailing “none of these candidates” in the Nevada presidential preference primary. Haley had 33% of the vote, to 60% for “none,” and The Associated Press called the race for “none.”

Haley was the only active candidate on the Republican primary ballot – Donald Trump deliberately didn’t file and is instead participating in Thursday’s state-run caucus. But there had been a quasi-campaign on the part of Trump forces urging people to vote for “none of these candidates” in the primary. Gov. Joe Lombardo, who has endorsed Trump, has said he would vote for “none” in the primary and then caucus for Trump Thursday night. ...

Democratic President Joe Biden won his second official Presidential Preference Primary of 2024, the “first in the West” Nevada primary Tuesday. The Associated Press called the race Tuesday with 61% of votes counted, and Biden winning 90% of them.

While Democrats expected Biden to win the state, he appeared beside 12 other candidates, including author Marianne Williamson, who ran for president in 2020 but ended her campaign ahead of the first Iowa caucus.

In the first batch of result, Williamson had 3.2% of the vote, trailing “none of these candidates,” which had 6.4%. ...

A painfully slow count, casually releasing results early, and an armed volunteer ordering around an election observer all marked the first day of counting ballots by hand in Nye County.

“It’s an embarrassing day for our democracy,” Athar Haseebullah, the executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, said in a statement. “A historic disaster is brewing in Nye County.”

Nye County officially began hand-counting ballots, a move adopted at the behest of election deniers, on Wednesday, less than a week after the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously ruled to make changes to the county’s proposed hand-counting process. The ACLU filed the lawsuit in early October. ...

How do you convince voters to pay attention to the race for secretary of state, a historically mostly low-profile administrative office that oversees how elections are conducted?

It’s not merely a theoretical question for several secretary of state candidates in the U.S. this year, who are running against election deniers who want to win the office to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election.

Democrat Cisco Aguilar is running against Republican Jim Marchant, an ardent election denier whose campaign is based on conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen by a global “cabal” that controls election workers, elected officials, judges of both parties, and the manufacturers of electronic voting machines. ...

Democrats are being pressed to do more to rein in prescription drug prices this year, while they still have a chance.

When speaking about efforts to lower prescription costs, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley admitted in a Senate Finance Committee in March the “difficulty of passing something like this in a Republican Congress,” adding, “If we want to reduce drug prices, then we need to do it now.”

“Sen. Grassley did say something pretty telling,” U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen said Tuesday. “He said the Republicans weren’t interested in voting on these things. The time is now while we’re here.”...