Four days before Nevadans vote, the man in charge of Nevada's elections has a message for the federal government: don't check.
Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar told the Trump administration this week that Nevada will not run its voter rolls through SAVE, the free federal database that checks registrations against immigration records. Twenty-six states have signed up, with Florida and Texas among the first. Nevada's Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, wrote to Aguilar at the end of September urging him to join them. Aguilar still said no.
The election is November 3, and Aguilar's name is on the ballot. He's running for reelection against Republican Jim Marchant. So the official refusing to let anyone verify the voter rolls is asking those same voters to keep him in his job.
His explanation was "Any claims of a widespread problem are false and only create distrust in our elections."
You'd think a man that confident in his rolls would welcome a second opinion.
SAVE, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, is run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow wrote to Aguilar on Monday asking Nevada to use it. "SAVE has streamlined processes, reduced administrative burdens," Edlow wrote, adding that "states that have used the enhanced SAVE capabilities have reported significant improvements." The Supreme Court cleared the way for states to use the system on September 25.
Aguilar answered by text message the next day. The tool, he said, has "too many false positives."
His go-to example is Missouri, where hundreds of eligible voters were mistakenly flagged. A flag is a reason to take a closer look, and somebody still has to confirm it before anyone loses a vote. A smoke detector that goes off when you burn toast still stays on the ceiling. Nobody rips it out and hopes the house never catches fire.
Nevada has already seen what happens when the feds look. In July, the Department of Homeland Security flagged nearly 16,000 potential non-citizens on Nevada's voter rolls. That list was narrowed to 185 higher-confidence matches. Aguilar's office reviewed those 185 itself and announced that every one of them was a citizen. Then it refused to let anyone else run the check.
Texas made the opposite call. It signed up for SAVE, and a coalition of left-wing voting groups promptly sued Secretary of State Jane Nelson and several county election officials over it. Texas kept checking anyway. By mid-September, it had referred 117 cases for investigation.
The Justice Department isn't waiting on Nevada either. This week, a 44-year-old Filipino woman became one of 48 non-citizens charged with election crimes across five states. Each faces up to a year in federal prison and a $100,000 fine.
Aguilar wraps his refusal in the Constitution. "We cannot and will not risk violating someone's Constitutional right to vote," he said. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has pointed out the other half of that equation: "Allowing just one non-citizen to vote cancels the vote of one U.S. citizen." Every one of those citizens has a constitutional right too.
Aguilar's own statement makes the strongest case against him. "It's a felony for those ineligible to knowingly register and vote in Nevada," he said. He's right. It's also a felony that's awfully hard to prosecute when the state refuses to look for anyone committing it.
Right now, Nevada's citizenship check is a box voters tick when they register, swearing they're citizens. That's the honor system, and Aguilar likes it that way.
If Nevada's rolls are as clean as Aguilar says, SAVE would prove it in an afternoon and he'd win the argument. If he won't let anyone look, voters can draw their own conclusions about why.
Nevadans vote November 3. Aguilar is on the ballot.