LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar says there are lot of successes coming out of the 2025 Legislature.
WATCH | Nevada Secretary of State: Ballot drop boxes would deliver faster election results
For instance, a fund to provide restitution to victims of securities fraud, many of whom are elderly retirees. Or the early efforts to create a business court in Nevada, a step toward poaching some corporate filing business from No. 1 Delaware. That could bring millions to Nevada in the future.
And there are the improvements to the state's small business portal, what Aguilar calls the "front door" for businesses looking to move to Nevada.
But when it comes to election-related bills, there were several disappointments, not least of which was Aguilar's omnibus election reform bill, Assembly Bill 534, which passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Joe Lombardo.
And then there was the saga of ballot drop boxes, which would have allowed voters to drop off their ballots after early voting ends on Friday and before the polls open on Election Day, the following Tuesday.
Lombardo vetoed a ballot drop box bill, Assembly Bill 306, saying there wasn't enough oversight of the boxes. (The bill specified, however, that they were to be monitored while in use and secured after hours.)
Then, after AB 306 author Speaker Steve Yeager, D-Clark County, tried for a compromise, including ballot drop boxes in a bill that would also have implemented voter ID requirements, Lombardo vetoed the compromise measure, saying the voter ID provisions were too weak.
Aguilar said the ballot drop boxes would have made election results clearer sooner.
"Nevadans want information in real time," he said. "They want their election results as soon as possible, and the drop boxes between early voting and Election Day would have helped relieve some of the capacity on the counties, especially in Clark."
Aguilar said 57,000 mail-in ballots were dropped off at the polls on Election Day 2024, ballots that, if turned in earlier, could have been counted earlier, and the results posted sooner.
"The bottleneck for Clark County is mail ballots dropped off at an election center on Election Day," he said.
Aguilar praised Yeager for advancing a voter ID measure, although he received criticism from fellow Democrats, who hate the idea. While Aguilar called voter ID "a solution in search of a problem," he said that voters appear to want it, and that it's coming whether people like it or not.
(To be sure, fully 73% of Nevada voters approved Quetsion 7, the voter-initiated constitutional amendment that would require ID when voting at the polls or by mail. It's likely the measure will be approved again when it comes up for a second and final approval in 2026.)
Yeager argued that it would be better to implement the law now, and work out any problems, rather than wait until the 2027 session, after which there will be just about six months to implement laws, write regulations and conduct training before the 2028 presidential preference primary takes place in February of that year.
Said Aguilar: "We know Nevada is going to have a say in the future of our country again [in 2028] and to be able to implement major programs like this in a short period of time are going to take a lot of effort, but if we could have started now, we would have been better off as a state."
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He said he was also disappointed by the governor's veto of Senate Bill 422, which would have provided for longer hours at the DMV around election time, to give people time to register to vote and get an ID that will likely be required to vote in the future.
"It was preparation for understanding what was coming ahead, especially with the photo ID ballot initiative," Aguilar said. "Knowing that, hey, this is coming, we have to be able to find ways to secure the system. Even though Nevada runs some of the safest, secure and accessible elections in the country, that accessibility piece is critical, along with the safety and security of the system and being able to ensure that voters could get access to an ID to be able to participate in the process."
In addition, Aguilar said the state is looking at new technology to allow drop boxes to scan mail-in ballots as they're inserted, to allow them to know their ballot will be counted. And there is also a new technology — called ballot marking devices — where voters will mark a paper ballot and insert it directly into a vote tabulation machine to see their vote counted in real time.
Currently in Clark County, electronic voting machines display a paper receipt of a voter's choices, but the voter only gets to see it behind a small panel of glass. The voting machine then records the vote, and its memory is physically transported to vote counting machines at the county's election center in North Las Vegas.
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