Trump campaign team sues Nevada over alleged non-citizen voting

Donald Trump's campaign and other Republican groups have filed a lawsuit accusing the state of Nevada of failing to remove non-citizens from its voter rolls. It is the fourth lawsuit filed by Republicans this year against the state's election process.

In the new lawsuit, filed Thursday in Carson City District Court, the Trump campaign, Nevada Republicans, the Republican National Committee and a Clark County voter accuse Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar of improperly maintaining lists and failing to investigate whether registered voters are noncitizens.

They claim that the state has failed to establish rules to verify that people on the voter rolls are citizens, or that the state has systematically removed noncitizens from the voter rolls, thereby failing in its duties. Republicans, they argue, see their votes diluted by this system and are therefore asking the court to require the state to address the problem through more aggressive roll maintenance.

The Democratic National Committee and the Nevada Democratic Party are also named as defendants in the lawsuit (citing a ruling in a voting rights case earlier this year that requires political parties seeking legal action affecting their opponent to include the other major political party in the lawsuit).

The three previous lawsuits filed by Republicans in Nevada — which involved the length of time in which absentee ballots can be received, voter roll practices and the counting of absentee ballots with unclear postmarks — were dismissed or denied, but they are all in various stages of appeal.

No state, including Nevada, allows noncitizens to vote in federal elections – this is a crime punishable by fines and prison sentences, and those found guilty face deportation or a change in immigration status. An analysis by the conservative Heritage Foundation found only 24 cases of such voter fraud since 2003, none of them in Nevada.

The Trump campaign's lawsuit states that there were thousands of noncitizens on the voter rolls in December 2020, “many of whom cast their ballots.” The lawsuit acknowledges that such reports of voter fraud were dismissed by then-Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske.

At the time, the Nevada Republican Party compared lists of people who presented immigration documents to the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain a driver's license with the statewide registration list to identify potential noncitizens. In investigating these claims, the Secretary of State's report concluded that about 4,000 people voted and presented an immigration document to the DMV in 2020, but that more than 40,000 immigrants had naturalized in Nevada in the four years prior to that. The report found no evidence that noncitizens had voted and stated that “general information obtained from the DMV cannot serve as the basis for an investigation into alleged voter fraud.”

But the lawsuit argues that Cegavske's conclusions were inadequate and based on a misunderstanding of previous Supreme Court cases. In addition, the campaign claims that a biannual survey by Harvard University's Cooperative Election Study included a number of noncitizens who said in the survey that they were registered to vote — and that that percentage is higher in Nevada (4 percent) than the national average (about 2.5 percent). And Republicans also cite public records showing that about 8 percent of Washoe County District Court potential jurors claimed disqualification because they were noncitizens — and that juries are drawn in part based on voter rolls.

“Nevada's elections should reflect the votes of citizens, not be influenced by noncitizens who have no legal standing to participate,” Nevada Republican Chairman Michael McDonald, who served as a sham elector in the 2020 effort to overturn Nevada's election results, said in a statement. “Any attempt to allow noncitizens to vote threatens the foundation of our elections and weakens the power of lawful voters in our state.”

The lawsuit notes that other states have also purged noncitizens from voter rolls, including Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott claimed in late August to have purged 6,500 noncitizens. Many election experts warn that these cases often misrepresent routine voter grooming and that the so-called noncitizen purges typically involve people who were incorrectly identified as noncitizens and often only recently naturalized.

Although there is no evidence that non-citizen voter fraud occurs in Nevada, Republicans claim that non-citizen voting is not only a problem, but that it also “favors Democratic candidates and harms Republican candidates.”

The plaintiffs are demanding that the state step in and require Aguilar to verify that all registered voters are U.S. citizens. They are suggesting that the state use citizenship verification programs. Republicans in the House have made a similar argument, passing a bill in July that would require prospective voters to show proof of their citizenship when registering to vote. Such a law was struck down in Arizona as a violation of the Voting Rights Act because proving citizenship is often difficult, including for college students and other people who are temporarily staying.

Kamala Harris' campaign and Democrats have argued in court filings that the Republicans' lawsuits are a public attempt to sow doubt about the election before it even begins, regardless of the outcome of the cases. The Trump campaign filed a barrage of lawsuits challenging the results in 2020. Despite losing 59 of 60 cases, unproven allegations of voter fraud persisted — about 30 percent of Americans do not trust the government to properly certify the election, according to polls.