Two Nebraska Republicans filed separate complaints this week with Attorney General Mike Hilgers, alleging that a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate and the Legal Marijuana NOW party's nominee swore false oaths when they filed to run, because neither one actually intends to serve if elected.
The complaints, obtained and verified by the Nebraska Examiner, target Cindy Burbank, who won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, and Mike Marvin, the Legal Marijuana NOW nominee. Both are accused of running as bad-faith candidates, placeholders whose real purpose is to manipulate the November ballot and undermine Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts in favor of nonpartisan challenger Dan Osborn.
If the allegations hold up, the implications go well beyond one prairie-state Senate race. Every candidate who files in Nebraska must sign an oath swearing, "I will serve if elected." Filing that oath without meaning it could trigger charges under state statutes covering election falsification, perjury, and false sworn statements. The complainants want Hilgers to investigate and, if warranted, prosecute.
Derek Schwartz, a La Vista police officer who ran unsuccessfully for the Nebraska Legislature in District 18 this spring, filed the complaint against Marvin. Lydia Brasch, a former state senator from West Point who served from 2011 to 2019, filed separately against Burbank.
Brasch framed the issue in blunt terms. "I believe election integrity in Nebraska, not just this cycle, but in all cycles going forward is a paramount priority," she said, "and that manipulation of Nebraska's election laws through strategic withdrawals and bad-faith candidacies is an unlawful practice that authorities should take steps to stop."
Neither Burbank nor Marvin responded to the Examiner's requests for comment Thursday evening. The Attorney General's Office confirmed it had received the complaints but said no action had been taken. A spokesperson offered no further comment.
The complaints did not materialize out of nowhere. The Nebraska Republican Party flagged Burbank to Secretary of State Bob Evnen back in March, arguing she was not a good-faith candidate with any genuine intention of serving. Evnen agreed and removed her from the ballot.
Burbank sued, and won. The Nebraska Supreme Court reinstated her, ruling that Evnen had acted too late to raise his objection. The legal defeat did not resolve the underlying question of whether Burbank's candidacy was legitimate. It simply meant the state missed its own procedural deadline.
That procedural stumble matters now. The state will formally certify the primary results on June 8. Evnen's office has already reached out to Hilgers for guidance on a pointed question: once Burbank is certified as the Democratic nominee, can the Secretary of State keep her on the November ballot if she then asks to be removed?
The scenario the complainants fear is straightforward. A candidate files, swears the oath, wins the primary, and then withdraws, leaving the party free to substitute a different name on the general-election ballot, or leaving the seat's opposition fractured in a way that benefits a preferred candidate. In this case, the alleged beneficiary is Osborn, the nonpartisan contender. All campaigns involved have denied any coordination.
Legal experts split on whether the complaints have teeth. Brandon J. Johnson, an election law specialist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law, expressed skepticism.
"In terms of what the oath requires, right, is a willingness to serve if elected, which doesn't seem to require running an active campaign... you'd probably run into some significant First Amendment problems if you required a primary candidate to run, no matter what."
Johnson went further, calling the complaints a symptom of a broader problem. "This is all politics," he said, "and trying to turn it into a legal issue is one of the things that's troubling about our current state of politics."
Former Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson, a Republican, took a different view. Peterson said he suspects courts "are not excited about being brought into political lawsuits," but argued that "in order to maintain the integrity of our electoral system it is imperative that the alleged facts be heard and decided by our judicial system."
The gap between those two positions captures the tension. If the oath means only that a candidate is theoretically willing to serve, enforcement becomes nearly impossible. If it means what a plain-English reader would expect, that you actually intend to hold the office, then filing it as a tactical maneuver could constitute a false sworn statement under Nebraska law.
Nebraska's primary was, by multiple accounts, rife with allegations of planted candidates. The complaints formalize suspicions that had been circulating for weeks. Whether Hilgers acts on them, and how quickly, will signal whether Nebraska's election laws have any real enforcement mechanism for this kind of conduct.
Election integrity concerns are not unique to Nebraska. In New Jersey, a former Democratic mayoral candidate recently admitted forging a thousand voter registration applications, a case that drew national attention to how easily the system can be gamed when officials look the other way.
The Nebraska situation raises a different but related question: what happens when the manipulation is baked into the candidacy itself? A forged registration is at least identifiable after the fact. A sham candidacy, by contrast, can distort an entire election before anyone with authority intervenes.
The state's "good faith" candidate requirement exists precisely to prevent this. Candidates must not only register and qualify, they must swear under oath that they actually seek the office. The statute is meaningless if no one enforces it, and so far, no one has.
Across the country, voters have watched candidates file for office under dubious circumstances with little consequence. The Nebraska complaints at least attempt to use the legal tools already on the books.
The clock is ticking. June 8 certification will lock in the primary results and start a new phase of maneuvering. If Burbank withdraws after certification, the Democratic Party could potentially name a replacement, which is exactly what critics suspect was the plan all along.
Hilgers has the complaints on his desk. He has a guidance request from the Secretary of State's office. And he has statutes that cover election falsification, perjury, and false sworn statements. What he does not yet have, apparently, is a timeline for acting.
Peterson's argument deserves weight here. Courts may not relish election lawsuits, but the alternative, letting oath requirements exist as decoration, invites exactly the kind of gamesmanship Brasch and Schwartz describe. If candidates can swear to serve, win a primary slot, and then vanish without legal consequence, the oath is theater.
The broader pattern should concern anyone who cares about clean elections. When election administration failures go uninvestigated, they tend to repeat. The same principle applies to candidate manipulation. Silence from enforcement authorities reads, to future bad actors, as permission.
Nebraska law already anticipated this problem. The oath language is specific. The penalty statutes exist. The only missing ingredient is the will to enforce them.
Meanwhile, voters in Nebraska face a general election in which one major-party nominee may have filed to run with no intention of serving, and the state's top legal officer has yet to say a word about it. That silence benefits exactly one side of the ledger, and it is not the side that played by the rules.
Courts that refuse to police bad-faith manipulation of the electoral process do not protect democracy. They hollow it out.
An oath that nobody enforces is just words on a page. Nebraska's attorney general has the chance to prove it still means something.
