As many of you are already aware, Nevada Day — the day when Nevada became a state — happens to coincide with another rather popular holiday. I write, of course, of Girl Scouts Founder’s Day, which takes place each October 31 in celebration of the birthday of their founder, Juliette Gordon Low.

As there is nothing spookier than children in uniforms learning valuable leadership skills, here is a scary story about a man with ambitions, a man who trusts the plan, and what might happen if he and his friends take over our elections after November 8th.

The story below is fictional — for now.

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Some of the staff in the Nevada secretary of state’s office initially chose to stay after Marchant’s election to minimize the amount of damage he could do. That attitude evaporated once Marchant appointed Wayne Willott, better known as QAnon influencer “Juan O. Savin,” as his chief deputy — especially after screenshots of the staff’s human resource files, home addresses included, were posted on Gab, Truth Social, and Patriots.win.

The state’s loss was Washoe County’s gain. The county registrar’s office, gutted after over a year of harassment of both staff and senior leadership, needed all the experienced help it could get, and former state staff certainly didn’t mind the county’s comparatively generous pay scale and legal protection fund. County election officials, however, are tasked with fulfilling state election regulations — regulations which were now being crafted by a cabal of conspiracy theorists who didn’t trust a vote counting process that required electricity or the ability to count past fifty.

That was a problem because the hand count process advocated for by Marchant and his allies before he became secretary of state was clearly not idiot-resistant, much less idiot-proof. When attempted in Nye County, the results were disastrous — volunteer talliers, required to tabulate dozens of elections simultaneously with each ballot, frequently lost track of which race they were tallying. Each volunteer tallier only successfully counted fifteen ballots each day and, if the expletives as they struggled to count were any indication, accuracy was by no means a given. After two days, both the state Supreme Court and previous secretary of state demanded an immediate halt to the count.

Setting aside the legality of letting observers listen to talliers yell the contents of each ballot at each other for a moment, more 700,000 ballots were cast in Nevada during the last presidential election and another one was coming up in 2024. At the rate ballots were counted in Nye County, it would take nearly 47,000 volunteer-days to count them all. There was no way — no way — Nevada could replace its voting machines with human hands. 

Even Marchant and his friends could see the folly in that.

Even Marchant was willing to admit — to himself if nobody else — that QAnon’s mathematical acumen, when it manifested itself, tended toward the theoretical and away from the arithmetical. Put less diplomatically, Nye County’s volunteers frequently struggled with the basic addition required to sum their tallies. At first, Marchant demanded county election officials order dozens of printing calculators. The experienced and forward-thinking staff now working in the Washoe County Registrar’s Office, however, thought it might be a good idea to conduct some basic user acceptance testing of the idea before rolling it out county-wide. During testing, they quickly discovered that volunteers frequently got lost with the calculators, too; the printed sums on the ribbon paper didn’t tell anyone which batches were summed and which remained.

The secretary of state’s office had a solution: Every precinct will be issued a spreadsheet. To ensure there wouldn’t be any errors — and to ensure the former state staff in Washoe County would stop sabotaging their efforts at delivering an artisanal, free range, locally grown, organic hand counted fraud-free election — each voting precinct would submit its results directly to the secretary of state’s office as well as to the local county election official. The secretary of state’s office would then double-check each county’s election results.

Spreadsheets are wonderful things. You can type anything into each rectangle and it almost auto-magically knows what you might want to do with it. Want a series of numbers? No problem — type 1 in one cell, then 2 in the cell below it, then let the software fill in the rest. Want to automatically convert an address into a series of cells? Here are 11 different ways you can do that. You can compare dates against each other, numbers against each other, words against each other — and never explicitly tell the software what kind of data you’re comparing before you do it. The software will figure it all out for you.

Usually. Most of the time.

There are some well-known exceptions, however. For example, many gene sequences had names like “SEPT1” or “MARCH1” — sequences which, to the uninitiated spreadsheet program, looked a lot like dates until they were renamed. Fractions also tend to give the software fits — did you want to divide 11 by 12 or refer to November 12th? Decimal values — think “4.00” — can also be interpreted as dates since international date formats are all over the map and some countries use decimals or commas instead of the forward-slash or hyphen notation Americans are more familiar with.

Oh, and it’s surprisingly easy to accidentally add a forward slash or period when you’re typing in a spreadsheet cell. Take a look at how close those keys are to your Enter key (or Return key, if you have a Mac) sometime.

The real fun, however, is when the spreadsheet program decides the user has typed a number representing the number of days since January 1, 1900. That, it turns out, is how certain spreadsheet software stores dates in the first place.

All of this is well known to those who have professional experience with spreadsheet software — in fact, this behavior is rather meme-worthy and is easy enough to work around if you know to look for it. Unfortunately, after a year and a half of senior management’s reflexive suspicion of anything with a power cord, the secretary of state’s office was completely bereft of anyone with professional experience. It was also, thanks to the conspiratorial mindset of the office, bereft of any measure of humility — anyone disagreeing with The Plan, after all, was a sheeple, a rube, part of the system, a groomer for the New World Order.

The secretary of state, naturally enough, trusted his office’s numbers over the numbers turned in by our state’s hardworking county election officials — even when they weren’t numbers at all.

That is why Marchant, wearing a beaming smile and finally fulfilling the pledge he made to make “President Trump president again,” proudly announced to the world that Donald Trump received January 7, 1904 more votes than Joe Biden.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered nonpartisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].