Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said the Trump administration’s scrutiny of the state’s election process is an effort to intimidate officials and suppress voting ahead of the November midterm election.
“This is all an effort to really force Nevada to fold,” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal Wednesday. “But unfortunately, we’re not going to fold in any way whatsoever until a judge demands that I have to conform.”
In recent weeks, the Department of Homeland Security singled out Nevada as one of four states where it said a preliminary review found more than 250,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls.
After a federal judge recently tossed a Department of Justice lawsuit seeking Nevada’s unredacted voter records, the agency explicitly informed Aguilar, a Democrat, that he was under investigation for allegedly not providing information that triggered the lawsuit in the first place.
Aguilar’s office said it has received seven Justice Department subpoenas related to voter information over the past few months.
“I think that if you start to look at over the last two years — since the ’24 cycle, it’s just an effort to intimidate and to force us into compliance,” Aguilar said in an interview. “It’s an effort to federalize our elections. But we know the Constitution is very clear that states run elections, not the federal government.”
President Donald Trump won Nevada in 2024 after losing the state in two previous presidential campaigns. He also won the six other battleground states. Still, he’s made unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud since his 2020 re-election loss.
Trump administration efforts
“Nothing is more fundamental than the integrity of our elections,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in a statement to the Review-Journal. “The President has also urged Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, legislation the American people overwhelmingly support and ensures Americans, and Americans only, decide our elections. President Trump is absolutely right: we fix this now, or we lose our country.”
The SAVE America Act that’s stalled in Congress would require people to present proof of citizenship to register to vote and show ID before casting a ballot.
A Trump executive order from March also has the potential to shake up the state’s mail voting process.
The order called on the U.S. Postal Service to propose a rule change that would ultimately require it to refuse mailing ballots to registered voters whose names are not on lists of U.S. citizens the federal government would compile. The agency recently finalized the rule.
Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford co-led a legal challenge filed by two dozen states that secured an injunction temporarily blocking the rule from taking effect. The Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case, something Aguilar said might happen.
“I would assume they would because it’s of such a national interest,” he said.
Election Day is Nov. 3, after two weeks of early voting in Nevada.
CNN and the New York Times reported that DHS was dispatching Homeland Security Investigations agents to probe voter fraud in Nevada and eight other states through mid-October. DHS did not dispute the reports but said it couldn’t comment on any possible investigation.
Earlier this month, Democratic U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., defended Aguilar’s work as the state’s chief elections officer and demanded that the Trump administration offer proof of voter fraud.
“If you have claims of voter fraud, bring it forward. I want to see it,” she told the Review-Journal. “And we know that they don’t.”
Cortez Masto, a former Nevada attorney general, said she is confident that the number of noncitizens who vote illegally is small. She said she would prefer that the administration work with local and state law enforcement officials to address the issue, something they’ve successfully done in the past.
Successful state challenges
States like Nevada secured a Supreme Court victory earlier this year when justices declined to overturn a Mississippi law that allows postmarked mail ballots to be counted a few days after Election Day.
A federal judge in Nevada last month dismissed the DOJ lawsuit that sought Nevada’s unredacted voter records from the 2024 election with information like full names, addresses, driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers.
On Sept. 4, DOJ official Eric Neff wrote Aguilar a letter demanding that his office preserve the records as their legal 22-month preservation period was set to expire.
Anticipating a lawsuit appeal, Aguilar said that his office already was holding onto the records past that time.
The same letter informed Aguilar that he personally was under investigation.
“We sent the letter to the states we are in active litigation against regarding their failure to provide the full (statewide voter registration lists) as required by federal law,” a DOJ official wrote in a statement to the Review-Journal. The agency did not respond to questions about any potential investigation.
‘They refuse to send it to us’
In a July prime-time address to the nation, Trump claimed that a DHS review had found more than 268,000 noncitizens registered to vote across the U.S.
That same day, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote Aguilar telling him that “as many as” nearly 16,000 names were found in Nevada.
Aguilar at the time disputed the figure as “wildly speculative at best,” and requested clarification.
In a virtual meeting, federal officials told Aguilar’s office that a manual review had confirmed just 185 names, classifying Mullin’s original figure as a “ceiling.” They classified another 6,218 names as “higher confidence matches” that required further review.
Aguilar told the Review-Journal that the data DHS provided lacked details that prevented his office from confirming the findings, and that the agency cut off contact with his office when it requested additional information.
“We’re talking about a constitutional right, and to misclassify a voter as a noncitizen when it’s not accurate is also legal liability on the state because you’re potentially creating a situation of libel and slander,” Aguilar said.
“It’s legally irresponsible and does not meet a legal threshold to make a final determination, and that’s why we politely ask for them to send us some additional information to help us further identify what they’re asking us to do, and they refuse to send it to us,” he added.
DHS did not provide an update on its review of Nevada’s names.
“DHS is laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “HSI is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found. We have repeatedly demonstrated that illegal aliens can and do vote in our elections.”
Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com.
