Nevada's top election official on Trump's midterm threats

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

**Cisco Aguilar** (0:21)
This administration has not won a major single court case when it comes to our elections, and will continue to win these. They can make the threat of jail, they can make the threat of prison. We're protecting the fundamental right to vote.

**Chris Bentley** (0:32)
Nevada's Secretary of State on election security ahead of the midterms, and why he won't be intimidated by President Trump. It's Tuesday, July 21st, and this is Here & Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.
A little later on the show, we'll hear from a lawyer who has sued food companies over disease outbreaks, including cyclosporiasis. He says government cuts are making it easier for gastrointestinal parasites to infect our food supply.

**Bill Marler** (1:11)
In July of last year, the CDC stopped counting cyclospora. So you have budget cuts on the federal level, budget cuts on the state level, and then you're not even counting the parasite in question.

**Chris Bentley** (1:25)
Before we get to that story though, President Trump wants to nationalize elections. He's leaning on Congress hard to get them to pass a bill that would make it more difficult for many Americans to register and vote. But for now, the election system is administered largely at the state level. That means the duty to fairly and accurately carry out elections falls on 50 secretaries of state, or similar positions depending on the state.
They're now facing pressure from a White House that wants to change how they run their elections, and a torrent of disinformation from the president about unfounded claims of fraud.
Cisco Aguilar is one of them. He's Secretary of State for Nevada. He's a Democrat running for re-election this fall. He told Scott Tong, the president's claims that thousands of non-citizens have registered to vote in Nevada is just not true.

**Cisco Aguilar** (2:24)
We have not received any single piece of data to justify their number. We don't know how they got those numbers. But the fact that they're making these accusations is just part of their overall plan. We have a president of the United States who's trying to choose his voters rather than the voters choosing him and his colleagues, and that's unfortunate. Yeah.

**Scott Tong** (2:41)
Going into this year's elections, the team in your state, do you sense that poll workers are being watched closely? Are they nervous? Is your legal team preparing for possible legal questions, legal challenges in this environment?

**Cisco Aguilar** (2:56)
I used to say you as the secretary of state, but now I feel like a managing law partner.
Having to deal with so many lawyers and so many of these issues, as secretaries of state, we have to be on the front line. We have to be prepared for every situation. Yes, we are ready to go. In the president's words, you're judged as a winner or a loser, and I think secretary of states are the winners right now. In the last two weeks, we've won three major legal cases, and that's because we were strategic in our legal approach. We challenged his first executive order, we won. We got a ruling on the second executive order, we won. Then Nevada had a big win at the Supreme Court on mail ballots. He's tried to get rid of mail ballots even though he uses a mail ballot.
Sixty percent of Nevadans use mail ballots in the last election cycle, our two reddest counties, Nye County and Douglas County, are the highest adopters of mail ballots. The fact that they continue to challenge these efforts just shows you that they don't understand elections, they don't understand their voters. I think what they're trying to do is just disenfranchise large groups of voters, especially Latinos.

**Scott Tong** (3:56)
This environment, this misinformation out there, these legal challenges that you're talking about, do you see all this as a bit of a dry run for 2028? Absolutely.

**Cisco Aguilar** (4:06)
We know that 26 is about 28 There are 26 secretary races across the country, 13 Democrats, 13 Republicans.
He knows that Democrats have majority of the battleground states except for Georgia, but Georgia is in our eyesight. If he can get control of these states, he knows that he can put his thumb on the scale for 28, and that's dangerous. I hope the Democrats realize that they need to step up and support secretaries across this country.

**Scott Tong** (4:31)
Put his thumb on the scale, how? How could that happen?