The Trump administration has demanded that Nevada’s top election official preserve all records from the 2024 election beyond what federal law requires — and threatened civil or criminal penalties if he refuses — in what Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar is calling an overt attempt at intimidation less than 60 days before the midterms.
In a letter sent Friday to Aguilar, a Democrat, a top Justice Department official ordered the preservation of all 2024 election records, including electronic files, network access codes, and computer logs. The U.S. Civil Rights Act requires election records to be kept for 22 months after a federal election — a deadline that expired last week for the 2024 general election. The Justice Department argues the records must still be retained because of ongoing litigation over its effort to obtain unredacted copies of the state’s voter registration lists, which include voters’ driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
The letter also notified Aguilar that he is personally under federal investigation on allegations that he violated federal voting laws by refusing to hand over the unredacted data.
“They’re just using this as an opportunity to intimidate us, and I’m not going to fold in any way,” Aguilar told the Nevada Independent.
The letter was written by Eric Neff, the acting chief of the voting section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — an official who, the Nevada Independent reported, was previously placed on administrative leave as a Los Angeles prosecutor amid allegations of bias in a case involving a software company targeted by election conspiracy theories tied to Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 election.
Friday’s letter is the latest escalation in a sustained federal pressure campaign. Nevada’s secretary of state has received seven voter-related subpoenas from the FBI over the past three months. The Justice Department had also filed a lawsuit to compel Nevada to surrender the unredacted voter file, but a federal judge dismissed that case last month; the Justice Department is now appealing.
CNN confirmed the subpoenas and reported that Aguilar slammed the move, saying the administration was “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.”
Central to the administration’s case has been the claim that Nevada’s voter rolls are filled with noncitizen registrations. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent a letter to Nevada officials alleging “as many as 15,903 non-citizens registered” in the state. President Trump amplified that figure in a July 16 primetime address, citing a DHS review of four Democratic-led states to claim “approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.”
Those numbers have not held up. In a private August 13 meeting with Nevada officials — the contents of which were later obtained by Democracy Docket, a voting-rights group founded by Democratic lawyer Marc Elias — DHS acknowledged it had confirmed only 185 potential noncitizen voters in the state. Federal officials described the nearly 16,000 figure as merely “the ceiling” of possible noncitizen registrations and said the review was incomplete. CNN, which reviewed internal records from the meeting independently, reported that an additional 6,200 names were labeled “higher confidence matches” still requiring vetting.
Aguilar said he had offered to cooperate with federal officials on the voter roll review, making the continued pressure campaign difficult to explain on the merits. “It’s fascinating that they’re continuing down this track of continued intimidation and continued threats when we’ve offered to work with them in the past,” he said.
His office will preserve the records because litigation is ongoing — but Aguilar drew a firm line.
“We will continue to make sure that we are not handing over information that does not need to be given,” he said.