By Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff
Oct 15 (Reuters) - The first Justice Department subpoena demanding voter information caught Democratic Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar off guard. It was June, and his office had been working informally with the FBI on routine election security.
Weeks later, in a July 16 address from the Oval Office, President Donald Trump claimed without evidence that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens had registered to vote, citing an administration review. That review cited Nevada
- a key prize in November's fight for control of the US Congress - as one of four states where noncitizen voter registration was widespread.
“We're going to be the target of this," Aguilar recalled telling Republican Governor Joe Lombardo before Trump’s address.
Then three more subpoenas seeking voter data arrived on September 1 and 2.
In total, the Justice Department would deliver seven subpoenas to Aguilar’s office between June 16 and September 2, a public records request shows.
As the Trump administration escalates its efforts to compel states to hand over voter rolls in search of fraud, the federal pressure is shaping a high-stakes rematch for Aguilar's job in Nevada, a top electoral battleground.
As secretary of state, Aguilar is Nevada's chief election officer, responsible for overseeing elections and certifying results among other administrative duties.
The subpoenas have buried Aguilar in paperwork, distracting him from his own reelection campaign against Republican Jim Marchant, who falsely claims the 2020 election was rigged to favor Democrats and whom Aguilar narrowly beat in 2022.
Lombardo has not endorsed either candidate, and did not respond to a request for comment on whom he's supporting.
Trump has framed many of his election-related moves as an effort to help Republicans win seats in a year in which his party is widely expected to lose control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate. He has claimed without evidence that Democrats want noncitizens to be able to vote because their support would return them to power, a charge rejected by Democrats.
More than 50 election officials and election-law experts see multiple ways the Trump administration could potentially interfere with the 2026 midterms, Reuters reported on Wednesday. They identified potential flashpoints ranging from election-fraud claims and pressure on state officials to seizures of election materials and immigration enforcement near polling sites.
The White House says the administration's goal is to safeguard election integrity and voting security.
AGUILAR KEPT BUSY ANSWERING SUBPOENAS
Aguilar said he considers the flood of subpoenas a deliberate attempt by the Trump administration to weaken his reelection bid and influence who will oversee Nevada's ballots in the 2028 presidential election.
A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency does not confirm or comment on grand jury subpoenas and declined to address Aguilar's assertions about political motivation. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Aguilar said his days were consumed by reassuring worried staff, pushing back on Trump's claims in media appearances, meetings with his personal lawyers and answering the subpoenas. Some donors had withdrawn support because they worried that support could harm their businesses, and his time for fundraising calls has dropped from as many as three hours a day to one a week, he said.
“If they can take me out in ‘26, they have control in ‘28,” said Aguilar, one of only two Democratic incumbent secretaries of state running in battleground states this cycle. “It’s absolutely intentional,” he told Reuters in an interview.
No other Democratic secretary of state - including in Arizona, the other battleground state where the incumbent is up for reelection - is known to have received any subpoenas, according to the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State and other secretaries in key swing states.
Unlike in states like Arizona where counties have more power, Nevada's elections process gives the secretary of state more control in administering elections, Aguilar and other secretaries of state said.
NO EVIDENCE OF WIDESPREAD VOTER FRAUD
Marchant welcomed the federal spotlight, arguing it would lead voters to question Aguilar's stewardship.
"People are so tired of not trusting their election system," Marchant said in an interview, claiming without evidence that Aguilar has overseen elections rife with fraud.
Aguilar dismisses such assertions.
He pointed out that it was already illegal for noncitizens to vote in Nevada, as is true in all states for federal and state elections. His office had also investigated Trump's claims and has not found evidence that any of the people flagged by his administration were noncitizens, he said.
Nevada, whose voter base is roughly 30% Latino, narrowly swung toward Trump in 2024 by 46,000 votes.
Louis Jacobson, a senior columnist with the politics website Sabato’s Crystal Ball, moved the race toward Aguilar in September, writing that Marchant's election denialism likely won't be warmly received in a Democratic-friendly political environment.
Still, Jacobson told Reuters the Justice Department's focus could cause some voters to stay away from Aguilar if they think he's administered fraudulent elections. It could also elevate him as a defender against Washington overreach.
TRUMP'S PRESSURE CAMPAIGN
The Trump administration has intensified a campaign to exert control over state elections, even as it struggles in court. The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to provide voter data and has lost 26 of those cases, including against Nevada.
The Department of Homeland Security has claimed as many as 16,000 noncitizens are on Nevada's rolls, an effort Aguilar says is designed to intimidate Latino voters who may worry federal immigration agents could seek to detain them at polls.
In meetings, DHS officials told Nevada election officials it had thus far confirmed only 185 such cases, according to emails and a video seen by Reuters. Nevada officials, however, said in the emails their records indicated all 185 were citizens and that DHS had provided nothing substantive to suggest otherwise.
A DHS spokesperson said officials have since found that at least 2,000 names on the initial list of 16,000 were those of noncitizens. DHS said it had given Nevada enough information to parse the list on their own, but Aguilar said the agency had not yet provided the state with credible evidence.
Aguilar said the accusations were meant to exhaust his office and erode public trust.
"This whole series of events is like lasagna," he said. "You keep adding on layers of threats and pulling our resources to respond."
THE PRICE OF DEFIANCE
The pressure has followed Aguilar home and across the state. Publicly, he has tried to project optimism and calm.
Aguilar recalled when he served as general counsel to tennis great Andre Agassi's business interests. Agassi had coaches and advisers around him, he said, but when a match began, he alone stepped onto the court.
Aguilar said he does not feel as isolated as Agassi did on those occasions, but as Nevada's top election official, he is the final decision-maker and the public face of the state's election system.
His initial concern about the subpoenas has now turned into defiance.
"Bring it," he said. They "don’t scare me."
(Reporting by Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, editing by Ross Colvin and Deepa Babington)
