Nevada Democrats held an 87,000-voter registration advantage over Republicans going into 2026.
Then the state started cleaning its voter rolls.
Today, that lead is 672.
Democrats have 569,337 active registrations. Republicans have 568,665. Nearly 400,000 voter records were removed from Nevada's active rolls — a combination of cancellations, inactive transfers, and routine maintenance — and a Democratic registration advantage that had defined Nevada politics for years collapsed into a statistical tie.
That is not an accusation. It is arithmetic.
The person who ran those voter rolls through all of it is Francisco "Cisco" Aguilar, Nevada's Democratic Secretary of State. He is now under federal investigation.
Seven FBI subpoenas have landed on Aguilar's office over three months, with November's midterms eight weeks out. Aguilar confirmed the subpoenas publicly on September 5. The Department of Justice had been issuing voter-related demands through the FBI since at least June.
The investigation started before the subpoenas. On December 11, 2025, the DOJ filed a civil lawsuit — United States v. Aguilar — seeking Nevada's complete statewide voter registration list: names, addresses, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers. Filed under the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and the Help America Vote Act, the suit was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Anne Traum on August 14. It is now before the 9th Circuit.
Seven subpoenas in three months tells you how voluntary cooperation was going.
The rolls had already drawn attention before the lawsuits. A Department of Homeland Security analysis flagged 15,903 potential noncitizens registered to vote in Nevada. DHS has acknowledged that figure is the ceiling — every name requires individual review. Of those, 185 were confirmed potential noncitizen registrations. Another 6,218 were higher-confidence matches still flagged for scrutiny.
Aguilar's office has described the investigation as political intimidation — the Trump administration "overwhelming" state election offices ahead of the midterms. In his telling, the federal scrutiny is the scandal, not what it found.
The math has a different answer. An 87,000-voter Democratic registration lead does not collapse to 672 from cleaning accurate data. Clean rolls don't move like that.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and the DOJ have not alleged that Aguilar personally registered noncitizens. They have alleged that Nevada's system allowed it to happen, and that the state's chief election officer slow-walked cooperation with the federal effort to find out how many times.
Aguilar's 87,000-vote edge is now 672 voters, and he is still arguing about the subpoenas.
