RNC files election integrity lawsuit against Nevada’s secretary of state

The Republican National Committee filed an election integrity lawsuit Monday against Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar alleging failure to update voter rolls.

New RNC Chairman Michael Whatley accused Mr. Aguilar of failing to comply with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which requires states to maintain an accurate and current voter registration roll for elections for federal office.

“Nevada has universal mail voting and no voter ID requirement, which makes Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar’s failure to comply with the NVRA and provide accurate voter rolls all the more concerning,” Mr. Whatley said. “Securing clean voter rolls in Nevada is a critical step towards ensuring that it will be easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

The RNC sent a letter to Mr. Aguilar in December alleging discrepancies in the state’s voter registration numbers and threatening to file suit if he did not meet the GOP’s demands. 

The RNC contends in its lawsuit that it found five of Nevada’s 17 counties have inflated voter rolls that demonstrate a lack of compliance with the NVRA. 

Republicans say that three counties have more active registered voters than adult citizens over the age of 18, and that two counties have active voter registration rates that meet or exceed 90% of adult citizens over the age of 18.

The GOP said other Nevada counties have unusually high rates of inactive registrants and some have unusually low rates of removals from voter rolls.

Nevada officials disputed the allegations made by the RNC after receiving its December letter about the validity of the state’s voter registration rolls, and called the RNC’s data analysis “comparing apples to orangutans,” The Las Vegas Review Journal first reported. 

The Nevada attorney general’s office, in a Jan. 18 response letter to the RNC, said that their organization’s analysis was made using incomparable data sets and that registration rates are not an appropriate basis for determining whether a state is complying with the NVRA.

The GOP’s lawsuit is the 81st case of election integrity litigation that the RNC has put forth this cycle. The GOP filed a similar suit against Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson last week.