The Justice Department has subpoenaed the Nevada secretary of state for voter information, according to a person familiar with the operation, at a time when the government is rapidly escalating efforts to prove President Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.
The office of Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and its chief election officer, confirmed receiving seven “voter-related” subpoenas from F.B.I. agents over the last three months, but declined to offer details.
It is unclear whether other states have received similar subpoenas. The U.S. attorney in Nevada, Sigal Chatta, whose office would have overseen the request, is a pro-Trump prosecutor who has repeatedly sought to cast doubt on the integrity of federal elections.
With less than 60 days to go before the midterm elections, the Trump administration has deployed hundreds of investigators to hunt for voter fraud, despite decades of evidence that it is exceptionally rare in the United States. The administration is also aggressively trying to shape how the midterm elections are run, demanding private voter information across the country and seeking to change election rules.
“The right to vote is written clearly in the Constitution, and we cannot take that right away without the highest confidence of a person’s ineligibility,” Mr. Aguilar said in a statement. “The federal administration is inundating election offices with investigations and questions ahead of the election, and making sweeping claims of election fraud to the public before any investigation is done. We will continue standing up for Nevada voters and remain focused on running a safe, secure and transparent election this fall.”
Roughly two dozen states have sued the administration over some of those actions. The Constitution empowers the states and Congress, not the executive branch, with authority to regulate elections.
The subpoenas follow previous efforts by the Justice Department to obtain private voter information in Nevada and elsewhere. In December, the Justice Department sued Nevada and 29 other states, demanding that they hand over private, unredacted voter files. Judges have tossed 23 of these lawsuits, including the one in Nevada.
Separately, the administration has asked the Supreme Court to bless its efforts to restrict mail voting through the U.S. Postal Service, and has enlisted multiple federal agencies in a broad effort to ferret out evidence of ineligible noncitizens on the voter rolls. A study by the conservative Heritage Foundation spanning a quarter-century revealed roughly 100 cases of noncitizen voting nationwide.
The focus on noncitizens has been led largely by the Department of Homeland Security, which has embarked on a weekslong hunt for ineligible immigrants among the nation’s registered voters. Hundreds of its agents have been pulled from their normal duties to scour a data set of names in search of illegal voting histories.
The establishment of a federal voter database has long been a goal of the Trump administration, spanning multiple agencies. Last year, the Justice Department began quietly attempting to build a national voter file. Also last year, the Department of Homeland Security began sending invitations to state election officials encouraging them to upload voter data on a mass scale — including full name, date of birth and Social Security numbers — to an immigration verification tool known as the SAVE system. The administration has also, for the first time, begun using data from the Social Security Administration.
A spokesperson from the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nevada, a presidential swing state that is hosting a race for governor and one potentially competitive congressional race, has been a particular focus of the administration. In July, the state was one of four highlighted by Mr. Trump during a prime time address as having thousands of noncitizens on the voter rolls. The president offered no evidence at the time to back up his claims.
The administration claimed to have identified 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states, including an exact number of 15,903 in Nevada. But during a meeting last month with state election administrators, Homeland Security officials were unable to substantiate those claims and said they had identified just 185 potential noncitizens in the state so far, according to emails as well as recordings of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
The nearly 16,000 they had originally identified represented “the ceiling” of potential noncitizens, a D.H.S. official said during the meeting.
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