Former President Donald Trump’s campaign and other Republican groups have filed a lawsuit alleging Nevada has failed to remove noncitizens from its voter rolls. It’s the fourth lawsuit by Republicans this year challenging the state’s election procedures.
In the new demand filed Thursday in Carson City District Court accuses Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar of improperly maintaining voter rolls and failing to investigate whether registered voters are noncitizens.
Republicans say the system is hurting their votes and are asking the court to require the state to address the issue through more rigorous roll maintenance.
All three of the Republicans’ previous lawsuits in Nevada — challenging the timing of when mail-in ballots can be received, voter roll maintenance and the counting of mail-in ballots with unclear postmarks — have been dismissed or denied, though all are in various stages of appeal.
No state, including Nevada, allows non-citizens from voting in federal elections, as doing so is a crime punishable by fines and imprisonment. Those found guilty may face deportation or changes to their immigration status.
An analysis of Heritage Foundation, conservative-leaning entity, only found 24 cases of that type of voter fraud since 2003, and none occurred in Nevada.
The secretary of state’s office told The Nevada Independent that voting by non-citizens is now illegal.
The Trump campaign’s lawsuit alleges that thousands of noncitizens were on voter rolls in December 2020, “many of whom cast ballots.” The lawsuit acknowledges that then-Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske dismissed those reports of voter fraud.
At the time, the Nevada Republican Party compared lists of people who submitted immigration documents to obtain licenses at the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) with state registry lists to identify potential noncitizens.
In investigating those claims, the secretary of state’s report found that there were about 4,000 people who voted in 2020 and had filed an immigration document with the DMV, but that more than 40,000 immigrants had become naturalized in Nevada over the previous four years.
The report found no evidence that foreign nationals voted and noted that “the generalized information obtained from the DMV cannot serve as a basis for an investigation into alleged voter fraud.”
But the lawsuit reiterates that Cegavske’s conclusions were insufficient and based on an incorrect understanding of previous Supreme Court cases.
“Nevada’s elections should be a reflection of the voices of its citizens, not influenced by non-citizens who have no legal standing to participate,” said Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, who served as a straw elector in the 2020 effort to overturn Nevada’s election results.
The lawsuit says other states have purged noncitizens from the voter rolls, including Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has said that the U.S. government had removed 6,500 noncitizens from the rolls by the end of August.
Several election experts warn that such cases often misrepresent routine voter roll maintenance, that so-called noncitizen removals are often people who have been identified wrongly as non-citizens, and who are often recently naturalized citizens.
The plaintiffs are asking the state to use citizenship verification programs.
Kamala Harris’ campaign and Democrats have argued in court filings that the Republicans’ lawsuits are a public effort to sow doubt before the election begins, regardless of the outcome of the cases.
