Let’s begin with the good news. It won’t take long. There’s little of it these days inside Nye County government.

At the Oct. 4 Nye County Commission meeting, embattled Commissioner Leo Blundo was prepared to present a costly plan to offer former commission members lifetime medical insurance coverage. By no small coincidence, calamitous one-termer Blundo is about to become a former commissioner after losing in the June primary.

You’d think he’d have more pressing business. Blundo faces felony domestic battery charges following an incident at his home earlier this year. But those who have followed his tumultuous tenure by now realize that doing business is what this guy’s all about.

Fortunately for county taxpayers, his harebrained scheme was pulled from the agenda before further embarrassment ensued.

That’s it. There’s your good news. The skies get cloudier from here.

At the Nye County Sheriff’s Office, where good help appears to be in short supply, Sheriff Sharon Wehrly is running for re-election amid an FBI investigation inside the department. The FBI served a search warrant seeking records in August at the sheriff’s office. Although the warrant remains sealed, the Review-Journal reported the investigation is focused on potential misconduct by Nye Capt. David Boruchowitz.

In a Nye-worthy twist, Boruchowitz himself confirmed the FBI’s search warrant in a video posted to social media.

In recent years, Boruchowitz has been entangled in several controversies, including the 2019 arrest of a Valley Electric Association CEO on charges that were later dismissed. In the heat of an ongoing sheriff’s race, Boruchowitz filed a criminal complaint against two department deputies – who just happen to be supporting Wehrly’s opponent – accusing them of committing a crime with a computer after they blocked him from a Facebook page. The Nye County District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute.

But infighting isn’t exactly news in Pahrump. Scratch the surface and you’ll find plenty of residents, some admitting their biases for the sheriff’s opponent, offering no shortage of complaints about the unequal application of the law in Nye County.

Other political brushfires receive little news coverage, but serve to illustrate what some political scientists might call systemic dysfunction in government. From heated exchanges on the library and school boards to the latest head-scratching issuance of the county’s lucrative cannabis permits, you needn’t look far to find them.

But by far the most troubling upheaval inside Nye County is the morphing of the clerk’s office into a partisan outpost that appears to fully embrace Donald Trump’s Big Lie about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and the inherent dangers of relying on voting machines to collect and tabulate the ballots. As the November general election approaches, the county’s decision to appoint Mark Kampf, an open critic of Dominion Voting Systems machines, and to agree with his flawed plan to count ballots by hand has drawn not only national news scrutiny, but an emergency petition to stop it filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada.

In another Nye County curveball, on Wednesday Fifth District Judge Kimberly Wanker dismissed the emergency lawsuit citing her frustration that it was unreasonable for her to be expected to review a lengthy county commission meeting in which the hand-counting plan was mansplained.

The ACLU was set to file a new petition Friday in the Nevada Supreme Court seeking to block the hand-counting maneuver, which has its base in false claims of ballot fraud in the 2020 election and multiple hunches about the safety of widely used voting machines.

The ACLU’s argument, Executive Director Athar Haseebullah says, is that the county’s plan was itself rushed through and based on debunked conspiracies about the safety of the machines. The organization also argues that the county’s tough new signature verification violates state law by enabling the clerk to require an identification card if it’s decided a voter’s signature doesn’t match. As ACLU attorney Sadmira Ramic put it in a statement, “Nye County’s proposed process is a rushed attempt to circumvent democracy” that threatens to make it more difficult for voters to cast secure ballots.

Kampf was appointed to replace longtime county clerk Sandra “Sam” Merlino, who had managed elections in Nye County for two decades without scandal or partisanship. In short, without embracing any of the fallacious conspiracies that have boiled up like toxic swamp gas thanks to Trump’s Big Lie. Nye County has more than 30,000 active registered voters, most of them Republican, for Kampf & Co. to count by hand.

Merlino retired early and expressed frustration with what the county commission was willing to do in the name of following GOP Secretary of State candidate Jim Marchant’s parade of election fraud snake oil salesmen. Kampf tipped his hand early, nodding in agreement with Marchant’s merrymen without a scintilla of evidence.

But this isn’t about evidence, and facts be damned. This is about weaponizing the vote across the country at the state and county level. As Marchant recently admitted during a Trump rally for Nevada Republicans in Minden, “When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re gonna fix the whole country, and President Trump is gonna be president again in 2024.”

Nye County remains a Big Lie petri dish, and there’s no insurance policy that protects its residents from their government.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in Time, Readers Digest, The Daily Beast, Reuters, Ruralite and Desert Companion, among others. He also offers weekly commentary on Nevada Public Radio station KNPR.