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The Republican National Committee is suing Nevada state officials over alleged inconsistencies in the state’s voter rolls.
On Friday, the RNC and the Nevada Republican Party filed a lawsuit in federal court against Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D) and five county clerks, alleging they have violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by not maintaining clean and accurate voter rolls.
The lawsuit claimed that five Nevada counties, including Clark County, have “inordinately high voter registration rates” as reflected by their voter rolls.
“At least three Nevada counties have more registered voters than they have adult citizens who are over the age of 18. That number of voters is impossibly high,” the lawsuit says. “An additional two counties have voter registration rates that exceed 90% of adult citizens over the age of 18. That figure far eclipses the national and statewide voter registration rate in recent elections.”
Moreover, the lawsuit claims, “Several Nevada counties have inordinately high inactive registration rates, indicating that Defendants do not make a reasonable effort to remove outdated registrations.”
By not maintaining clean and accurate voter rolls in compliance with federal law, the RNC said that “Aguilar is imperiling election integrity in the 2024 elections and sending a clear message to Nevada voters that he does not care about clean and accurate voter rolls.”
In a statement, RNC Chairman Michael Whatley explained why this is a critical election integrity issue. He said:
Election integrity starts with clean voter rolls, and that’s why the National Voter Registration Act requires state officials to keep their rolls accurate and up-to-date. 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. 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 Aguilar a demand letter in December threatening a lawsuit over the alleged problems.
But the state attorney general’s office, representing Aguilar, strongly pushed back on the RNC’s claims, arguing the party’s methodology for calculating the discrepancies is flawed.
A 12-page response letter argued the RNC conflated incomparable data sets — the U.S. Census’ 2022 Current Population Survey and Nevada’s Citizen Voting Age Population from 2019 — to calculate the alleged discrepancies.
“It defies credulity that a survey conducted for an entirely different purpose, with a necessarily inaccurate recall-based measure of registration and a necessarily imprecise sample estimate of registration, forms a cornerstone of your analysis,” the letter argued.
“This is comparing apples to orangutans,” it added.
The RNC filed a similar lawsuit against Michigan in federal court last week.
