It seems the Nebraska Secretary of State, a guy whose office was bought for him by Pete Ricketts in 2018 in exchange for being the public face of Ricketts’s 2016 “I Love The Death Penalty” campaign, decided to wrongly put his thumb on the scale in a sad attempt to help Don Bacon.

As near as I can tell, someone from the Nebraska Republican Party snuck into a Zoom call for Kara Eastman’s campaign, recorded it, and told the Secretary of State that Eastman campaign staffers admitted to collecting ballots, which would be illegal *because they’re staffers.*

The Secretary of State, because he is a hack, sent a cease & desist letter to the Eastman campaign and pointed out the illegal behavior. The Nebraska GOP, since they fabricated this story, had a press release ready to go. The Bacon campaign, also in on it, immediately chimed in.

The media was all over it, covering it as “Secretary of State sends letter over potentially illegal activity by Eastman campaign.” Bacon’s and NE GOP’s social media teams have hammered it all weekend. The problem? The most basic fact was wrong so the ballot collection was legal.

It IS illegal for Eastman campaign staff to collect ballots. That’s true. But the staff who talked about collecting ballots weren’t working for Eastman’s campaign. They work for the Nebraska Democrats. There’s nothing illegal about what they did because they aren’t campaign staff

So the Secretary of State, who is a hyperpartisan Republican hack, participated in a partisan hit job based on misinformation created by the Nebraska GOP for the express purpose of discouraging people from voting for Kara Eastman in a toss up race that’ll be decided by <5K votes.

And Don Bacon, who by now absolutely knows this whole thing is misinformation, continues to allow his campaign to spread lies about his opponent because even the best polls for him show the outcome of the race within the margin of error. He needs his constituents to buy the lie. https://twitter.com/donjbacon/status/1322896672465309696

The truth is very clear. But Bacon directly benefits from dirtying up his opponent through GOP lies so he wholeheartedly embraces the lies. This is the truth and the Nebraska GOP really, really hopes people in NE-2 will vote based on the lies: