‘We Have to Punch Back’: Top Nevada Official Prepares For Trump’s Election Havoc

“We’re going to take some punches, but we can’t fall,” Aguilar says. “We have to continue to protect Nevada. We have to punch back.”

During his address to the nation in July, President Trump claimed to have identified about 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections, 16,000 from Nevada alone. That number has shrunk dramatically every time the state has pushed back on it.

From the start of the investigation, Aguilar says his office has struggled to get clear answers. The White House has said that the President’s allegations were based on the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, which was originally designed to check whether or not someone was entitled to government benefits. 

Nevada is among the states that has refused to upload sensitive voter information to SAVE over concerns over its accuracy and data privacy. (Election officials in Texas and Missouri discovered they had falsely marked dozens of U.S. citizens as noncitizens using SAVE.) Over the summer, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened that state and local election officials who refuse to use the department’s database to identify noncitizens on their voter rolls could potentially face “prison time.”