How a pro-Trump elections official became MAGA’s 'most unlikely scapegoat'

10 June 2024

Conservative Republican Cindy Elgan is a long-time elections clerk in Esmeralda County, Nevada. The country leans to the right politically, and Donald Trump carried it by 82 percent in 2020 even though now-President Joe Biden won Nevada on the whole.

But in a New York Times article published on June 10, reporter Eli Saslow details the animosity that Elgan, now 65, has experienced from far-right MAGA Republicans because she refused to accept or promote conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

MAGA Republicans in Nevada, according to Saslow, demanded that Elgan be recalled from her position as an elections official — claiming, "Cindy Elgan has run interference in our elections."

Saslow explains, "It was an outcome she'd feared for the last three and a half years, ever since former President Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, and his denials and distortions spread outward from the White House to even the country's most remote places, like Esmeralda County…. In the days after the election, some residents began to suspect that he should have won by even more, and they parroted Trump's talking points and brought their complaints to the county's monthly commissioner meetings."

Saslow notes that Elgan was a "most unlikely scapegoat" for the MAGA movement, as she is a longtime Republican who even had a flag outside her home that read, "Trump 2024 — Take America Back."

Nonetheless, schoolteacher Mary Jane Zakas, an Esmeralda County Republican, and others claimed that Elgan had been compromised by "the deep state."

"They falsely claimed the election was stolen by voting software designed in Venezuela, or by election machines made in China," Saslow notes. "They accused George Soros of manipulating Nevada's voter rolls. They blamed 'undercover activists' for stealing ballots out of machines with hot dog tongs."

Saslow continues, "They blamed the Dominion voting machines that the county had been using without incident for two decades, saying they could be hacked with a ballpoint pen to 'flip the vote and swing an entire election in five minutes.' They demanded a future in which every vote in Esmeralda County was cast on paper and then counted by hand. And when Elgan continued to stand up at each meeting to dispute and disprove those accusations by citing election laws and facts, they began to blame her, too."

Read the New York Times' full report at this link (subscription required).

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