Nevada Finally Dusts the Ledger Clean—Two Years Late and a Dollar Short, Say the Skeptics

By Someone Who Ain’t Got No Time for Shenanigans

It was a mild sort of Monday in Nevada when the Secretary of State’s Office sauntered out with a grand announcement–they had finally gotten around to sweeping out the old cobwebs from the voter rolls, booting some 160,000 names clean off the list and giving another 37,000 the bureaucratic cold shoulder. The official word was that this was all part of a grand, noble effort to ensure the transparency, security, and accessibility of the Silver State’s sacred elections.

Now, that might’ve sounded mighty fine if folks didn’t remember that just two years earlier, in the year of our Lord 2022, Secretary Francisco Aguilar had assured the public—with a straight face and polished boots—that the voter rolls were just as clean as a new whistle and needed no more scrubbin’. He dismissed any talk of dead folks or ghost voters with the kind of certainty only a politician with a paper-thin broom could muster.

“Nothing to see here,” he hollered from his high horse perch, and sure enough, nothing got done.

Fast forward to 2024—after all the primaries, preferences, generals, and probably a few scandals over lukewarm coffee—and suddenly, the rolls weren’t so clean. The state’s numbers showed that counties sent out 185,644 notices warning folks that their voting credentials were hanging by a thread, and more than 138,000 got benched. The same names Aguilar once dismissed as harmless now warranted a post-election purge so mighty it could’ve sent chills up a corpse’s spine.

The whole affair’s cloaked in legalese and officialdom, with mentions of the National Voter Registration Act and “blackout periods” that make you wonder if we’re talking about voting or bootlegging. The counties couldn’t touch the lists for ninety days before each election—not because they didn’t want to, mind you, but because the rules forbade it. It’s the law, they said, and by gum, we follow it–just not too fast.

And what of the poor souls deemed “inactive”? The folks who haven’t voted, haven’t called, haven’t written, and maybe didn’t even know they were still on the list. A couple of missed elections, a postcard returned “undeliverable,” and you’re tossed in the limbo bin–not dead, not deleted—just forgotten like last year’s snow.

The counties–overworked and underloved, have to do all this alongside a heap of other responsibilities—especially the 15 out of 17 that aren’t Clark or Washoe. The clerks out yonder don’t just deal with elections; they probably mend fences and deliver calves, too.

But let’s not forget the headline here–162,519 voter registrations canceled, 37,749 made inactive. And all of it after the election, when the ballots got boxed and the power comfortably seated. Aguilar now crows about the success of the cleanup and the importance of a shiny new statewide voter management system. He encourages voters to check their info, update their details, and add their phone numbers—lest they vanish like old acquaintances.

My how the tune changes after the music stops.

So here we are, with the rolls finally pruned, the dead metaphorically buried, and Aguilar preaching from a new hymnal. But some folks out here remember 2022.

They remember getting told the barn was clean even while the stink lingered. And now, seeing all these names struck down in 2024, they can’t help but ask–If the list was so spotless two years ago–what exactly were we standing on?