RNC Files Election Integrity Lawsuit Against Nevada Secretary of State

A voter returns a voter card after casting their ballot on the first day of in-person early voting inside a tent at a shopping center in Las Vegas on Oct. 22, 2022. David Becker/Getty Images

The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Nevada GOP have sued the Nevada Secretary of State, accusing the state’s top elections official of undermining voter confidence by failing to follow federal law on the proper maintenance of voter rolls.

The RNC filed its complaint on March 19 at the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, accusing Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar of failing to keep voter rolls accurate, in violation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

“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,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement.

‘Easier to Vote and Harder to Cheat’

The NVRA requires that states maintain accurate and current voter registration rolls for federal elections. But the RNC said in its complaint that a half dozen Nevada counties have implausible voter registration rates.

“At least three Nevada counties have more registered voters than they have adult citizens who are over the age of 18,” the complaint reads. “That number of voters is impossibly high.”

The three Nevada counties in question are Douglas (104 percent), Lyon (105 percent), and Storey (113 percent).

Another two Nevada counties have voter registration rates in excess of 90 percent of adult citizens over the age of 18: Carson City (92 percent) and Clark (91 percent).

“That figure far eclipses the national and statewide voter registration rate in recent elections,” the plaintiffs wrote in the complaint.

U.S. Census data released in May 2023 shows that the national voter registration rate for the 2022 Congressional election was 69.1 percent—the highest for a midterm election since 2000.

Nevada’s statewide voter registration rates for the 2022 and the 2020 elections were 65.1 percent and 66.2 percent of the voting-age citizen population, per the complaint.

Additionally, several Nevada counties have unusually high rates of inactive registrants: Elko (31 percent), Eureka (23 percent), Humboldt (26 percent), Lincoln (25 percent,), Mineral (30 percent), Nye (31 percent), Washoe (17 percent), and White Pine (23 percent).

Some other counties have unusually low rates of removals from voter rolls, per the complaint.

“Securing clean voter rolls in Nevada is a critical step towards ensuring that it will be easy to vote and hard to cheat,” Mr. Whatley said in a statement.

The Nevada Secretary of State did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

‘Protecting the Vote’

The Nevada lawsuit comes after a recent leadership shakeup at the RNC saw Mr. Whatley become the chair and former President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, take the post of co-chair.

Both Mr. Whatley and Ms. Trump have said publicly that a key focus of theirs will be election integrity.

The latest lawsuit marks the 81st case of election integrity litigation that the RNC has engaged in during the current election cycle.

The RNC recently filed a similar lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, accusing her of undermining public confidence in elections by failing to properly maintain voter rolls.

An analysis by the RNC showed that 76 of Michigan’s 83 counties have inflated voter rolls, in violation of the NVRA. Among them, 53 counties have more active registered voters than voting-age U.S. citizens.

“Jocelyn Benson has failed to follow the NVRA, leaving Michigan with inflated and inaccurate voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election,” Mr. Whatley said in an earlier statement.

In an emailed statement to The Epoch Times, Ms. Benson denounced the lawsuit as “meritless.”

Ms. Benson added that more than 700,000 voter registrations have been canceled since she took office and another 520,000 have been slated for cancellation in 2025.

“Federal data shows Michigan is the fifth most active state in the nation in removing the registrations of voters who have died,” she wrote.

“Let’s call this what it is: a PR campaign masquerading as a meritless lawsuit filled with baseless accusations that seek to diminish people’s faith in the security of our elections,” Ms. Benson added.

Focus on Election Integrity

Ronna McDaniel left her post as RNC chair on March 8.

In her final speech as the head of the organization, she said she believes Mr. Whatley will be “phenomenal” in the role and, in particular, on an issue that President Trump “cares deeply about, which is election integrity.”

For his part, the former president said in mid-February that he’s convinced that Mr. Whatley, who served as general counsel for the North Carolina GOP in addition to being its chairman, will be “committed to election integrity, which we must have to keep fraud out of our election so it can’t be stolen.”

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks in the library at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on March 4, 2024. Alon Skuy/Getty Images

The former president maintains that he was cheated out of victory in the 2020 presidential election in part because of outright fraud and in part because of last-minute changes to election rules that sharply expanded opportunities to cast mail-in ballots, while softening voter verification requirements.

Mr. Whatley said recently that the Republican party would use all available tools to help President Trump to win the 2024 election, while also ramping up its focus on election integrity.

He said in a recent memo that the RNC would bolster programs that focus on both in-person and absentee early voting, as well as ballot harvesting where legal.

Mr. Whatley said that the various initiatives aimed at voter outreach and early voting will be paired with strong election integrity efforts, including mounting legal challenges to voter identification and signature verification rules that were put in place in the 2020 election.