Nevada election chief reveals DOJ sent seven subpoenas over ‘last three months’
Nevada’s Democratic Secretary of State, Cisco Aguilar, accused the trump management of overwhelming election offices with investigation demands, including seven Justice Department subpoenas received over the past three months, just before the upcoming election. Aguilar emphasized the importance of voting rights and criticized federal efforts to scrutinize election processes without clear evidence of misconduct. The subpoenas, reportedly from the FBI, relate to Nevada’s voter registration and maintenance practices. This action follows a prior legal dispute where Nevada’s court dismissed the DOJ’s request for unredacted voter data, and the DOJ has appealed. Nevada also disputes President Trump’s claims about noncitizens voting in the state. Similar federal investigations are occurring in other states, including Georgia and Arizona, involving ballot records and election reviews.Aguilar vowed to protect Nevada voters and ensure election security amid these federal inquiries.
Nevada Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar accused the Trump administration on Friday of flooding election offices with demands ahead of November after his office confirmed it received seven voter-related Justice Department subpoenas over the “last three months.”
“The right to vote is written clearly in the constitution, and we cannot take that right away without the highest confidence of a person’s ineligibility,” Aguilar told the Washington Examiner in a Friday statement. “The federal administration is inundating election offices with investigations and questions ahead of the election, and making sweeping claims of election fraud to the public before any investigation is done.”
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“We will continue standing up for Nevada voters and remain focused on running a safe, secure and transparent election this fall,” he added. It is not immediately clear whether other states have received similar subpoenas.
The Nevada Independent previously reported on Thursday that the Nevada secretary of state’s office received the seven subpoenas, which the office characterized as being from the FBI. The office did not say what records the subpoenas sought or provide any further details.
The DOJ requests come less than a month after the department lost its civil case seeking Nevada’s unredacted voter-registration list, which included voters’ names, addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers.
It is not immediately clear whether the records relate back to that litigation. The department has sued 29 states seeking similar information and has lost in 23 of its cases so far, while many remain under appeal.
U.S. District Judge Anne Traum, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, dismissed the case last month, ruling that Nevada did not have to provide its statewide voter-registration list under the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The DOJ appealed the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
Aguilar previously called the department’s request for voter information an attempt “to intimidate us into turning over protected voter data.”
The DOJ previously said in its complaint that it sought the records to assess Nevada’s compliance with voter-list maintenance requirements under federal law.
Nevada has also disputed President Donald Trump’s recent claim that as many as 15,903 noncitizens could be registered to vote in the state. Homeland Security officials said last month they had identified 185 potential noncitizens, although they referred to the larger figure as a possible “ceiling.”
The subpoenas put Nevada alongside other battleground states where the FBI has sought election records this year.
In January, FBI agents used a search warrant to seize more than 600 boxes of ballots and election records from Fulton County, Georgia, as part of an investigation into alleged irregularities in the 2020 election. A federal judge later denied Fulton County’s request to force the FBI to return the materials, finding that officials had not established that their rights were “callously disregarded.” The ruling allowed the FBI to retain the records.
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In March, the FBI used a federal grand jury subpoena to obtain records from the Arizona Senate’s 2021 review of Maricopa County’s 2020 election. The subpoena sought hard drives, videos, forensic images, and other records related to the review by Cyber Ninjas, according to a copy obtained by Votebeat.
The Washington Examiner contacted representatives from the DOJ and the FBI.
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