Nevada election officials announced the implementation of a new voter-registration and election management system last week that they said will speed up the state’s release of election results and reduce voter registration errors.
Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, and Washoe County Registrar of Voters Cari Ann Burgess showed reporters the new system and its processes Wednesday. Every county will use the program in the 2024 November general election, though Clark County, which implemented the program before the 2024 election cycle, will merge its voter registration database with the state in 2025.
“Nevada runs some of the most safe, secure and accessible elections in the country,” Aguilar said. “[This system] only enhances those safeguards and increases our transparency.”
Previously, the state operated under a bottom-up approach with each county having its own processes for registering voters, running elections and reporting results — leading to delays, inefficiencies and other errors such as a coding problem that led to inaccurate online voter history records after the February presidential primary.
Aguilar attributed past issues to the fact that each county operated its election apparatus separately. Now, without requiring each county to transfer data to the state and then have the state compile it, officials “eliminated the opportunity for error that existed in the previous systems.”
Under the new top-down system, formally known as the Voter Registration & Election Management Solution (VREMS), every county will use the same election management processes and one centralized statewide voter registration database.
The program’s implementation was required through a law approved in the 2021 legislative session. The system was originally supposed to go live by January 2024, but implementation was delayed. Last year, the Legislature approved $30 million to help implement VREMS before the 2024 general election.
Though the voter registration program is centralized, the process for tabulating ballots is completely separate from the state and will continue to operate in a decentralized manner. Aguilar said that decentralization will help maintain security and allow for county-level control over those processes.
Security and transparency
As Nevada is one of the most transient states in the country, Aguilar said the new program will allow officials to update voter rolls more quickly and accurately than in the past and immediately track if a voter moves from one county to another.
He added that a new digitized check-in process will offer a more seamless voting experience. Messaging about how to register and vote will be more consistent, he said, and with counties all using the same system, state officials will be better able to provide counties with hands-on support.
“A lot of this boils down to security and transparency,” Aguilar said, noting that the new program will also allow for unified data reports getting as specific as the precinct level, offering officials the ability to immediately check a voter’s history, ensure no one is double voting and more quickly know if a voter needs to verify his or her signature.
Burgess, who said she used a similar system while she was working in Minnesota elections, described the new program as “coming full circle.”
“It is very safe, secure and we’re going to be absolutely amazed this year of how fast and how easy it is for our poll workers to do,” she said, referencing the use of new digital devices called “poll pads” to help check in voters who are casting a ballot.
Though there are less than two months until Election Day, Aguilar said he’s not worried. The state has already invested resources to train county elections teams and officials will continue to practice using the new program in the coming weeks, he said.
“We know how important the Nevada vote is. We are a purple state. We are a battleground state. We are a swing state,” Aguilar said. “We have to make sure Nevada votes count.”
