“If this administration chooses to challenge the elections, yes, we are preparing for it,” Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and top election official, tells TIME. “We know it's a very high probability,”
Yet Nevada is a perennial swing state that draws intense interest from both parties in presidential election years. Trump won the state in 2024 by 3 percentage points. Nevada, Aguilar says, is the only state in the country to have received seven voter-related subpoenas from the Department of Justice this year. He has also been informed he is personally being investigated by the DOJ.
In anticipation of federal officials attempting to seize ballots, Aguilar’s office has prepared what he calls a "Mad Libs" legal filing that is fully researched and drafted. All that’s missing are the plaintiff, the defendant and the jurisdiction. The point, he says, is for his office to be able to file lawsuits “within seconds” if a federal agent shows up at a Nevada polling location.
Aguilar, an attorney and an entrepreneur working in sports management, had never served in public office before being elected Nevada’s Secretary of State in 2022. That year, he defeated a former Republican lawmaker who claimed that Nevada's electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election were stolen from Trump, despite formal investigations finding no evidence to support that. He is on the ballot again this year, running for a second four-year term while also gearing up to defend the integrity of the election results in every Nevada county.
A voter fraud investigation collapses
During his address to the nation in July, President Trump claimed to have identified about 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections, 16,000 from Nevada alone. That number has shrunk dramatically every time the state has pushed back on it.
Nevada is among the states that has refused to upload sensitive voter information to SAVE over concerns over its accuracy and data privacy. (Election officials in Texas and Missouri discovered they had falsely marked dozens of U.S. citizens as noncitizens using SAVE.) Over the summer, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened that state and local election officials who refuse to use the department’s database to identify noncitizens on their voter rolls could potentially face “prison time.”
“Our records indicate that they were citizens. You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise,” Greg D. Ott, Nevada's deputy attorney general, wrote in an emailed response to DHS.
“DHS is assisting Nevada by narrowing their list of nearly 2.3 million registered voters to just 15,903 who match an alien in DHS records. DHS is providing a service to the citizens of Nevada,” the spokesperson said.
“A third grader has to show more work in a math problem than DHS is having to show in challenging the citizenship of American citizens,” Aguilar says.
Race to count ballots quickly“We can't scare people away from the polls because of our over-response or being reactive to the situation,” he says.
Yet concerns over the reliability of mail-in ballots remain pervasive, as the Trump Administration continues to claim without evidence that voter fraud is rampant. "What we're concerned about is there seems to be a lot of—not seems to be, there is a lot of cheating in vote by mail," Trump said this week while campaigning in Nebraska.
“If you're concerned about going to a polling location, use your mail ballot. Do it in the safety of your home. Do it over dinner with the rest of your family,” he says, while also encouraging people to go to a polling location and vote in-person.
“The shorter the time we get results out, the less time the feds have an opportunity to create a narrative that could create chaos within the elections process,” he says.
But Aguilar, like election officials in several other states, is trying to be ready for anything, including a series of protracted legal fights that might start as soon as the polls close.
“We have to have a strategic response because we have to maintain confidence in the process and the system,” he says. “It is unfortunate that we have to prepare for this, because we can't take anything lightly.”
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