When Clara Andriola took her seat at the Washoe County, Nev., commission meeting room on July 9, she looked out at a sea of angry faces. The commission is Washoe’s main legislative body, and Andriola, a longtime local business executive, was appointed to fill a vacancy on the five-person board last year. She had just won a Republican primary that would almost certainly allow her to keep that seat in the November general election. The commission was required by law to certify elections at every level, from local primary to presidential election. What came next should have been a simple administrative procedure.

But the restless crowd had other ideas. For three hours, they told stories of a primary gone wrong. Some raised concerns about small bureaucratic errors, like improperly addressed ballots. Others shared more exotic allegations, including an unsubstantiated rumor circulating on X about a Serbian scheme to manipulate voting machines. The stories did not add up to any clear theory about what happened or why, but the community had come to believe that democracy was threatened and that there was only one way to save it: They wanted Andriola to vote with her two Republican colleagues to deny her own victory.

Andriola took her legal duty to certify elections seriously, and the stakes of her decision reached far beyond Nevada. Like thousands of administrators around the country, Washoe County commissioners are charged with certifying elections not just at the commission level but also as the first step in the process of formalizing the presidential results nationally. And Washoe wasn’t just any county. It was a swing district in a swing state.

For that reason, Andriola’s hyperlocal primary had taken on national importance. Washoe County’s longest-serving commissioner, Jeanne Herman, was one of the first and only local commission members in the country to vote against certifying Biden’s win in 2020, “because the election was improper,’’ she told me. She was outvoted at the time by the four other commissioners. But in 2022, a local cryptocurrency multimillionaire named Robert Beadles and a growing movement of election denialists helped elect a second commissioner who expressed doubt about the 2020 results, Mike Clark. With one more like-minded Republican commissioner, the doubters would have a three-vote majority.

Andriola had touted her support of Donald Trump in her campaign ads, but she also said that elections “should not be a partisan issue.” She won the primary by a comfortable margin against several election-denying challengers, and her victory was affirmed even after Beadles financed a recount. (Technically the July 9 meeting was for a second certification, of the recount.)

But now, at the hearing, Beadles himself presented an analysis of the ballot data that described the election outcome as a “13.4 sigma” event — so unlikely as to be virtually impossible without some kind of interference. The analysis came from a Long Island math enthusiast named Edward Solomon, who made a similar — and widely debunked — argument in 2020 to support claims that Biden stole the race. But to Beadles, it merited careful consideration. “I’ve given you guys enough evidence right there that you guys should hit pause,” Beadles said. “Do your duty.”