Nevada is the latest battleground state where Democrats are suing to make voting easier.
The state party and three Democratic campaign organizations went to court Thursday, alleging illegal inequities in the rules Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske has created for the primary, which she's delayed to June 9 and decided will be conducted almost entirely by mail because of the coronavirus.
The suit asks a state trial judge to mandate many more in-person voting sites and the delivery of mail ballots to infrequent voters. It also seeks the suspension of several Nevada election laws, among them provisions for strictly matching signatures on ballots to those on file and a prohibition on having non-family-members collect and deliver absentee ballots.
The suit argues that, without those changes, too many voters picking nominees for Congress, the state Legislature and judgeships will face the same grim choice between civic responsibility and safeguarding health that confronted Wisconsinites last week.
Almost 4000,000 people went out to vote after courts forbade extending absentee ballot deadlines or delaying the election -- fully aware that long lines and confusion were certain, because hundreds of voting locations were going to be abandoned by poll workers feeling unsafe.
"Reducing in-person voting locations to just one location per county moves Nevada in the wrong direction and guarantees a repeat of Wisconsin's mistakes," attorneys wrote in the complaint. "It will force many Nevadans to crowd into a single polling location, waiting in line for hours, risking their health and the health of their families in order to exercise their right to vote."
Cegavske has said in-person voting may be limited to as few as one fully staffed venue in each of the state's 17 county-level jurisdictions. The suit notes that in the two counties that are home to 87 percent of the state's population, those centered on Las Vegas and Reno, voters will have just one location for same-day voter registration, which is taking effect for the first time this year.
The suit challenges plans to mail ballots only to people who voted in 2016 and 2018, saying this would disenfranchise more than 50,000 people. And it seeks a waiver from the state's strict rules against so-called ballot harvesting.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.