Nevada rolled out a top-down voter registration and election management system in September, with under two months until Election Day in the battleground state.
The updated structure “only enhances those safeguards and increases our transparency,” according to Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar’s comments to the Nevada Independent.
While each of Nevada’s 17 counties had its own election database and unique process for registering voters and running elections, the new system consolidates all data, instituting a centralized approach ahead of November.
Voter Registration and Election Management Solution, or VREMS, has been fully implemented after the process was initiated in the spring of 2021. The “centralized statewide voter registration database” connects election processes and data from all counties and consolidates all the information into a single system.
Last year, the state legislature approved $30 million to implement the top-down system before November. VREMS will prevent voters from casting a ballot twice, quickly scan for voting history, and help determine if signature verification is required.
Washoe County Registrar of Voters Cari Ann Burgess praised the system as “very safe, secure.”
Burgess was labeled as “shady, shady, shady” by constituents when she was appointed interim registrar earlier this year. Some Nevadans suggested she wasn’t qualified for the job and got the role because she had “friends in high places,” according to CNN.
The news comes as Nevada’s governor has thrown his weight into another initiative to tighten election security: a statewide voter ID requirement.
Gov. Joe Lombardo (R-NV) chairs the bipartisan Nevada Voter ID Coalition, which supports a question on the state’s ballot this November that would require voters to provide proof of their identities when voting either by mail or in person.
Nevada does not require voters to provide any type of identification before casting a ballot in most cases.
“We require people to have a valid form of identification to get on a plane, to operate a motor vehicle, or to purchase alcohol or cigarettes but not to cast a vote in an election. That is illogical,” the Republican governor said last year.
A Nevada Independent poll indicated that 74% of the state’s residents supported implementing a voter ID law.
Nevada has been deemed a battleground state key to winning the White House by former President Donald Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaigns, and its election practices have been the subject of intense scrutiny this election cycle.
In a move that it argues protects the integrity of the vote, the Trump campaign is working to block the acceptance and processing of mail-in ballots in Nevada days after the November election.
Trump lost the state and the presidential election in 2020. Four years later, he said the state is the pathway to a presidential victory. “If we win Nevada, we win the whole thing,” the former president told Las Vegas supporters in June.
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The Democratic secretary of state agreed that Nevada is critical in the election.
“We know how important the Nevada vote is,” Aguilar said. “We are a purple state. We are a battleground state. We are a swing state. We have to make sure Nevada votes count.”
