Nevada's Top Election Official Drafts Template Lawsuits in Case Federal Agents Show Up at Nov. 3 Polls

Cisco Aguilar is getting ready for a fight that hasn't started.

Nevada's secretary of state says his office has drafted what he calls "the Mad Libs of legal filings." The plaintiff, the defendant and the jurisdiction are blank. Everything else is researched and written, so the state can sue "within seconds" if a federal agent shows up at a Nevada polling place on Nov. 3.

"If this administration chooses to challenge the elections, yes, we are preparing for it," Aguilar told TIME. "We know it's a very high probability."

What Aguilar says he is bracing for

Aguilar says he is planning for immigration agents at polling locations, federal law enforcement moving to seize ballots, and the president openly disputing Nevada's results. He has spent much of the year on those plans.

He also says Nevada is the only state to receive seven voter-related subpoenas from the Department of Justice this year. And he says he has been informed he is personally being investigated by the DOJ.

Those are Aguilar's statements. No charges have been announced against him or his office.

"I take it as a badge of honor," he said. "We are following the law every single day. We are proving it in the courts."

Aguilar chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. He is also on the ballot himself this year, seeking a second four-year term. He has an interest in the outcome and a partisan label to consider when weighing his predictions.

What Trump has and hasn't said

Trump has not announced any plan to put agents at polls. Asked by TIME last month, he declined to rule out declaring a national emergency, invoking the Insurrection Act, or sending ICE agents to polling stations.

"I don't rule anything out or in. We'll see," he said.

That is not a threat, and it is not a denial either. Aguilar's office is planning around the gap.

The broader record gives election officials reasons for concern. Votebeat reports that the administration is investigating the 2020 election, which Trump continues to falsely say he won, and has seized years-old ballots and election materials from Fulton County, Georgia. Trump has said he regrets not sending the National Guard to seize voting equipment after 2020. Last year he said Republicans should take over running elections in some heavily Democratic jurisdictions.

Many of his election initiatives have stalled in courts or in Congress, according to Votebeat.

The non-citizen voting claim

In a rare primetime address in July, Trump warned of a "crisis in election security" and said the nation's systems fell "catastrophically short" of ensuring free and fair elections. He claimed to have identified about 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in federal elections, including 16,000 in Nevada.

That number has shrunk dramatically each time Nevada has pushed back, according to TIME. The White House has said the allegations were based on the Department of Homeland Security's SAVE database, which was originally designed to check whether someone is entitled to government benefits. Nevada is among the states that have refused to upload sensitive voter information to SAVE over concerns about its accuracy and data privacy. Election officials in Texas and Missouri discovered they had falsely marked dozens of U.S. citizens as noncitizens using the system.

On a Zoom call obtained by The Las Vegas Review-Journal through a public records request, one DHS official struggled to substantiate the department's numbers, saying DHS had not conducted "a full manual review" of the 16,000 Nevada voters it flagged. DHS officials then said they believed the list was down to 185, but did not have the names available. Nevada later received what Aguilar called an "incomplete" dataset on those 185. He says every one was a U.S. citizen.

DHS disputes that characterization. A spokesperson said the 185 voters "were simply a subset of individuals that had gone through a rigorous manual review process at that time of the call," and said DHS is narrowing Nevada's list of nearly 2.3 million registered voters to 15,903 who match an alien in DHS records.

Aguilar notes that voting while knowingly ineligible is a felony in Nevada. He says he can't say with certainty that there are zero non-citizens on the rolls, and that his office is still waiting on DHS to provide more information so officials can analyze the data.

That is a fair question to ask of a state with a closely divided electorate. Trump carried Nevada in 2024 by about three points, 50.59% to 47.49%. Nevada voters also approved a photo ID ballot measure that year with 73.23% of the vote, which shows how mainstream election-integrity concerns are across party lines in the state.

A legitimate concern about rolls does not settle whether federal agents belong at polling places. Those are two separate questions.

The White House response

The administration says the alarm is overblown. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said Democrats are conjuring up irrational concerns that undermine efforts to improve election security.

That is the administration's position. Aguilar and other officials answer that they are following the law and are being targeted for it.

Aguilar is not alone in preparing. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told Votebeat: "The only limit is our imagination. To some extent, all of us are really shadowboxing here. We don't know when – or if – the blow is going to land from whom, or under what circumstances."

Election officials in jurisdictions large and small are talking to lawyers and preparing legal filings, Votebeat reports. They expect that most standoffs with the federal government would end up in court.

Why Nevada isn't a headline state

Nevada has no marquee Senate race this year, unlike Michigan or Texas. But some of its House races are among those that could help decide whether Republicans keep the chamber. Aguilar defeated a former Republican lawmaker in 2022 who claimed Nevada's 2020 electoral votes were stolen from Trump, though formal investigations found no evidence of that.

Aguilar's argument is that his office needs to be able to act within seconds if a federal agent shows up at a polling location. His office has built its response around that.

Early voting in Nevada starts Oct. 17, and Election Day is Nov. 3. Whether any of the filings get used depends on a decision no one outside the administration has announced.

The contents of the seven subpoenas and any timeline for the investigation Aguilar says is open have not been made public.