Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar bumps fists Tuesday with poll worker Patsy Salazar as Darlene Russell looks on at a polling site in the Galleria At Sunset mall in Henderson. Aguilar, Nevada’s top election official, was making the rounds of polling places on Primary Election Day.
Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar arrives late Tuesday morning at a polling site at Hollywood Recreation Center in east Las Vegas and starts thanking the election workers.
One catches his eye: Aguilar shakes hands and talks with a high school student working alongside his dad at the polls for the primary election.
“You’re my hero now!” Aguilar said to the worker. “Thank you for what you do.”
Aguilar has established a reputation as an advocate for poll workers in a time when threats and harassment of election officials have skyrocketed.
Aguilar was a proponent of the Election Worker Protection Act, which would prosecute anyone who harasses or reveals identifying information about election officials.
Aguilar said the law was a last resort but still an important barrier to protect officials. No one has been prosecuted under the law.
“It’s a tool you have to choose to use very wisely, because there is a balance between free speech and protecting safety,” said Aguilar, the state’s top election official who took office in January 2023. “It’s frustrating to me that it continues to get challenged — it just blows my mind why somebody feels entitled to violate somebody’s own personal security and safety.”
Public confidence in elections and ballot security has been tested by claims of election interference by Republicans after former President Donald Trump’s narrow loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Trump continues to trumpet the election outcome as “rigged” despite his representatives bringing more than 60 court challenges nationwide where judges, including those appointed by Trump and other Republican presidents, looked at the evidence and said there was no evidence of widespread fraud.
More than 27% of voters expressed no confidence that 2024 ballots would be counted accurately, according to a 2023 Associated Press poll.
In Nevada, six Republican party officials face charges of participating in a fake elector scheme in 2020 to keep Trump in office. Trump continues to add to the doubt, including Sunday in a Las Vegas appearance when he again labeled the 2020 election as being rigged and claimed a future win for Democrats would be the result of further voter fraud.
Aguilar isn’t buying that narrative.
“We know for a fact that Nevada runs some of the safest, most secure, and accessible elections in the country,” Aguilar said. “You look at the last quarterly report and you see that it does not have a fraud problem. What we do have is a responsibility to pursue voter education so Nevada voters understand what systems and checks and balances are in place to protect the election.”
Asked whether Aguilar felt the notion of voter fraud had been blown out of proportion, the secretary of state had a one-word answer: “Absolutely.”
But to Aguilar, voters’ fears of election interference present an opportunity to help educate them on the process.
“It goes back to voter education, right? You have to look at the positives of all these situations and be able to figure out, how do we use this opportunity to educate voters?” Aguilar said.
Out of one million votes cast in the 2022 general election in Nevada, 146 were investigated for double voting, and only 47 were referred to criminal investigations, according to the secretary of state’s quarterly election security report.
The secretary of state’s office is moving to help provide further security to elections through the Voter Registration & Election Management Solution project.
That puts in place a centralized statewide voter registration database and supports the connection of election management systems throughout the state to that database for secure and accurate elections, according to the office.
Additionally, Aguilar met with local law enforcement and federal agencies to collaborate on how best to respond to different election security scenarios, ranging from voter intimidation to cyberattacks.
Count underway earlier: As Aguilar jumps from polling places, officials elsewhere are already working to tally the vote.
A new policy allows officials to begin tallying early votes at 8 a.m. on Election Day, with the goal of handing the early vote results by 6 p.m. They can’t be published until the last vote is cast.
Aguilar said his department’s biggest concern — one shared by Gov. Joe Lombardo — was capacity, both in human capital and technical tools allowing them to provide election results on time.
The primary election represents an opportunity to adjust before the general election, when voter turnout is expected to be significantly higher with the presidential race at the top of the ballot.
Aguilar doesn’t want Nevada to be the last state to tally its ballots, knowing the outcome of the race could likely be decided in our swing state.
“My greatest fear is ending up in a 266 versus 266 in the (Electoral College), I do not want to put Nevada in that position,” Aguilar said, referring to Nevada, with its six electoral votes, potentially being the last state to report its results. “If we can do things operationally within the law to ensure that we don’t get there, I think that has the best benefit to Nevada.”
While the earlier tallying of votes is an effort to relieve some pressure, the Voter Registration and Election Management Solution Project, also known as VREMS, is what Aguilar says is the long-term solution.
Current systems throughout the state’s 17 counties require manual aggregation before data is released, but VREMS will tally results in real-time to ensure better tracking of voting and potential issues that might arise, he said.
“Some of these legacy systems concern me, and that’s why it’s imperative that we continue to move forward with VREMS, because we know the cybersecurity of those systems are at the highest levels and have the greatest protections that we can have in a voting system,” Aguilar said.
VREMS is expected to be instituted statewide in July, after the primary election but before the general election, giving officials time to learn how to use the system and be comfortable with it. The modernization of the election system with VREMS represents his department’s ultimate purpose, Aguilar said.
“The secretary of state’s office, at the bottom line, is a technology company — we use technology to drive corporate and business filings, we use technology to do our securities investigations,” Aguilar said. “It’s also technology in the election space to increase accuracy, and make sure we’re doing what we need to do and giving the voter that best experience to have trust in the system.”
Aguilar’s experience varied drastically before taking office but among his various roles, the secretary of state said his time as chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission most informs his current position.
“I like to say it like this: the voters are the fans, the candidates are the athletes and then the clerks and the registers are kind of like the judges and the referee,” Aguilar said. “The lines are so dependent on a strong commission following the law and being a strong regulator. … It’s your job to call those balls and strikes. And it may not be the most popular decision, but you have to make that decision.”
When the polls close and the last voter casts their ballots, Aguilar is still at work, helping to ensure the tallying of votes and aggregation of data is readily available for the public. As far as what Aguilar is proud of doing, he says it’s still too early to tell.
“Not yet,” Aguilar said. “I mean there’s a lot of progress, and I don’t think we can take our eye off the ball. And until we see actual complete success can we let up. We have to keep the intensity.”
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