Cisco Aguilar believes this Election Day will be unlike any other in Nevada’s history. He is bracing for immigration agents to descend on polling locations, for federal law enforcement to move to seize ballots and for the President to openly dispute the state’s election results.

“If this administration chooses to challenge the elections, yes, we are preparing for it,” Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and top election official, tells TIME. “We know it’s a very high probability,” 

Aguilar has spent much of the year planning around what the federal government might do in his state on Nov. 3. Nevada hasn’t been a focus of the national political discussion during this year’s midterm elections. While some of its House races are among those that could decide whether Republicans hold on to the chamber, it doesn’t have a high profile Senate race like Michigan or Texas.

Yet Nevada is a perennial swing state that draws intense interest from both parties in presidential election years. Trump won the state in 2024 by 3 percentage points. Nevada, Aguilar says, is the only state in the country to have received seven voter-related subpoenas from the Department of Justice this year. He has also been informed he is personally being investigated by the DOJ.

“I take it as a badge of honor,” Aguilar says. “We are following the law every single day. We are proving it in the courts. I’m not sure what you’re going to find, but continue to do your intimidation attempts.”

In anticipation of federal officials attempting to seize ballots, Aguilar’s office has prepared what he calls a “Mad Libs” legal filing that is fully researched and drafted. All that’s missing are the plaintiff, the defendant and the jurisdiction. The point, he says, is for his office to be able to file lawsuits “within seconds” if a federal agent shows up at a Nevada polling location.

In an interview with TIME last month, Trump declined to rule out declaring a national emergency or invoking the Insurrection Act around the midterms, or sending ICE agents to polling stations. “I don’t rule anything out or in. We’ll see,” he said.

Aguilar, an attorney and an entrepreneur working in sports management, had never served in public office before being elected Nevada’s Secretary of State in 2022. That year, he defeated a former Republican lawmaker who claimed that Nevada’s electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election were stolen from Trump, despite formal investigations finding no evidence to support that. He is on the ballot again this year, running for a second four-year term while also gearing up to defend the integrity of the election results in every Nevada county.

“We’re going to take some punches, but we can’t fall,” Aguilar says. “We have to continue to protect Nevada. We have to punch back.”

A voter fraud investigation collapses

During his address to the nation in July, President Trump claimed to have identified about 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections, 16,000 from Nevada alone. That number has shrunk dramatically every time the state has pushed back on it.

From the start of the investigation, Aguilar says his office has struggled to get clear answers. The White House has said that the President’s allegations were based on the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, which was originally designed to check whether or not someone was entitled to government benefits. 

Nevada is among the states that has refused to upload sensitive voter information to SAVE over concerns over its accuracy and data privacy. (Election officials in Texas and Missouri discovered they had falsely marked dozens of U.S. citizens as noncitizens using SAVE.) Over the summer, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened that state and local election officials who refuse to use the department’s database to identify noncitizens on their voter rolls could potentially face “prison time.” 

A few weeks later, members of Aguilar’s office found themselves on a Zoom call with DHS officials. During the call, which was obtained by The Las Vegas Review-Journal through a public record request, one DHS official struggled to substantiate their own numbers, saying that the department has not conducted “a full manual review” of the 16,000 Nevada voters it identified as non-citizens. Upon further review, department officials said they believed the list of noncitizens on Nevada’s voter rolls was down to 185, but didn’t have that list of names available. Weeks after that initial meeting, Nevada received what Aguilar described as an “incomplete” dataset from DHS of the 185 suspect voters. Aguilar says every single one was a U.S. citizen.

“Our records indicate that they were citizens. You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise,” Greg D. Ott, Nevada’s deputy attorney general, wrote in an emailed response to DHS. 

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson disputed the characterization, saying that the 185 voters “were simply a subset of individuals that had gone through a rigorous manual review process at that time of the call.”

“DHS is assisting Nevada by narrowing their list of nearly 2.3 million registered voters to just 15,903 who match an alien in DHS records. DHS is providing a service to the citizens of Nevada,” the spokesperson said.

Aguilar notes that it is a felony in Nevada for a person to vote in an election when they know they are ineligible. While he can’t say with certainty that there are zero non-citizen on the state’s voter roll, his office is still waiting on DHS to provide more information so Nevada officials can properly analyze the data.

“A third grader has to show more work in a math problem than DHS is having to show in challenging the citizenship of American citizens,” Aguilar says.

Race to count ballots quickly

Early voting in Nevada starts on Oct. 17. Aguilar’s office has instructed polling location managers to prepare for every scenario and respond in a calm, pragmatic manner.

“We can’t scare people away from the polls because of our over-response or being reactive to the situation,” he says.

In Nevada, every registered voter automatically receives a mail ballot to use if they prefer. Since 2022, 86% of Nevadans have used mail-in ballots at some point in an election cycle, among the highest use rates in the country.

Yet concerns over the reliability of mail-in ballots remain pervasive, as the Trump Administration continues to claim without evidence that voter fraud is rampant. “What we’re concerned about is there seems to be a lot of—not seems to be, there is a lot of cheating in vote by mail,” Trump said this week while campaigning in Nebraska. 

With Election Day just a few weeks away, Aguilar’s message to Nevadan voters is simple: make a plan, and don’t let fear change it. 

“If you’re concerned about going to a polling location, use your mail ballot. Do it in the safety of your home. Do it over dinner with the rest of your family,” he says, while also encouraging people to go to a polling location and vote in-person. 

In recent years, election officials across the country have pushed to become more transparent about how ballots are stored and counted. Nevada has developed a system that lets voters track their ballot, whether cast in person or by mail. And amid efforts by Trump and others to cast doubt on elections in which the outcome of races remain undecided for days, Aguilar is pressing counties to report results as quickly as possible. 

“The shorter the time we get results out, the less time the feds have an opportunity to create a narrative that could create chaos within the elections process,” he says. 

Thus far, judges are pushing back on the Administration’s efforts to interfere with how elections are conducted. Last week, a federal judge tossed out a DOJ lawsuit to seek voter information from the state of Georgia, the 26th out of 30 lawsuits that the Trump administration has lost in its effort to assemble complete voting lists. Another lawsuit, brought by a civil rights organization, is seeking to prevent ICE agents from showing up in polling places.

But Aguilar, like election officials in several other states, is trying to be ready for anything, including a series of protracted legal fights that might start as soon as the polls close.

“We have to have a strategic response because we have to maintain confidence in the process and the system,” he says. “It is unfortunate that we have to prepare for this, because we can’t take anything lightly.”

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