Nevada election chief says Trump’s voter crackdown is about fear, not fraud

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar told MS NOW he is “ready for battle” ahead of the midterms, as President Donald Trump continues a nationwide crackdown on voting access.

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In July, the administration said it found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  However, election officials say they have no idea how the federal government came up with that number, since the states refused to comply with the Justice Department’s requests to provide their full, unredacted voter rolls.

“It’s really frustrating because if you look at a third grader, and if they have to do a math problem, they have to show their work,” Aguilar told Vaughn Hillyard on Sunday. “The federal government has made these allegations, and they’ve not shown their work or provided any transparency into the process they use to identify, or make the assumption that we have, noncitizens on our voter rolls.” 

Although the administration claims to be targeting noncitizens in its crackdown, Aguilar said every American should be concerned by the move. “I think the American public should be worried about how the federal government is using information that they have about them,” he said.

“This is not a party issue,” Aguilar said. “This is about personal privacy. This is about the protection of somebody’s personal data and the fact that they are gathering this information about American citizens in a way that they have not explained.”

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The secretary urged the Trump administration “to be honest with the American public about how they’re using this personal information.”

Aguilar said he did not believe the president’s pursuit was about protecting the integrity of elections. Instead, he said it was an effort to “prevent certain communities” that may be more critical of the president “from participating in our upcoming elections.”

“They’re throwing everything at us, including the kitchen sink, because they know again that they are in trouble,” he said of the administration.

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You can watch Aguilar’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.