The Trump campaign expressed concern Nevada isn’t doing enough to keep noncitizens off voter registration rolls in a new lawsuit against the state.
The Trump campaign argued on Thursday that Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar should take further action to protect the integrity of the vote, according to court filings.
The Nevada GOP, the Republican National Committee, and a Clark County voter are joining the Trump campaign’s lawsuit against Aguilar, the Democratic National Committee, and the Nevada Democratic Party.
The lawsuit is a dispute to former Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske’s review of the Nevada Republican Party’s alleged evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election. In 2021, Cegavske said she did not find “evidentiary support for the contention that the 2020 general election was plagued by widespread voter fraud.”
The Trump campaign and its allies are now arguing that Cegavske’s findings were based on a faulty interpretation of prior Supreme Court cases.
It also cited Harvard University’s Cooperative Election Study, which indicated that Nevada’s 4% of noncitizen respondents who claimed to be registered to vote is higher than the national average of roughly 2.5%.
Additionally, the campaign pointed to court public records showing that 8% of one district court’s jury pool claimed disqualification because they were noncitizens. The GOP used the data as evidence in its lawsuit that noncitizens have made it into voter rolls, as juries are compiled in part through voter registration lists.
Aguilar pushed back against the GOP’s claims that he is “failing in his list maintenance and investigatory duties to ensure that only U.S. citizens are registered and voting in Nevada elections.”
“There are already numerous safeguards in place to prevent noncitizens, or anyone ineligible to vote, from casting a ballot,” the secretary of state’s office told the Nevada Independent. “Any claims of a widespread problem are false and only create distrust in our elections.”
The RNC and the Nevada GOP recently celebrated the secretary of state’s office after it removed over 76,000 inactive voters from the state’s active voter list in August.
“NVGOP & the Trump campaign have taken the lead to ensure election officials follow the law and clean our voter rolls. Thank you @NVSOS for these important updates,” the Nevada GOP praised in a post to X on Wednesday.
Election integrity starts with clean voter rolls.
That’s especially true in a state like Nevada, which automatically sends a mail ballot to every active voter listed on the roll.
Proud of this unified @GOP campaign to promote election integrity in the Silver State. https://t.co/nG29Dqa5Nb
— Michael Whatley (@ChairmanWhatley) September 11, 2024
Both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have emphasized the importance of winning Nevada as it is shaping up to play a crucial role in determining the outcome of the presidential election.
Trump most recently made an appearance in the state in late August during a visit to a Las Vegas restaurant. Wading into the kitchen to greet employees, he pitched his no-tax-on-tips policy that has gained traction with the electorate. The former president is set to hold another Nevada rally Friday evening in Las Vegas.
Trump narrowly lost the battleground state during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. As Nevada looms large in the 2024 presidential race, election security has become a major theme in the state.
The Trump campaign, RNC, and the state GOP are in the midst of another legal battle to prevent the counting of mail-in ballots in Nevada that lack a clear postmark and are received several days after Election Day.
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Additionally, Aguilar’s office announced it had fully implemented a new top-down voter registration and election management system in September. The “centralized statewide voter registration database” connects election processes and data from each of the state’s 17 counties and consolidates all the information into a single system.
Meanwhile, Gov. Joe Lombardo (R-NV) is fighting to implement a voter ID law, as Nevada does not require voters to provide any type of identification before casting a ballot in most cases.
