If you haven’t already heard, there will be a presidential preference primaries administered by the Nevada Secretary of State starting with early voting January 27. But the Republican presidential preference primary, which has former South Carolina Governor and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley on the ballot, will not count toward assigning delegates, even though it might send a powerful message to the GOP.

Instead of using the state-run election to advise how to allocate delegates for the GOP’s national convention in July (ultimately deciding the party’s nominee for the 2024 general election in November), the Nevada Republican Party has opted for a privately run caucus at 5 p.m. on Thursday, February 8. On that ballot are Donald Trump and businessman Ryan Binkley.

According to the Nevada GOP’s website, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former governor of New Jersey Chris Christie and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy will not appear on the caucus ballot after they suspended their campaigns. The party has said it will not accept names written in on the ballot, further eliminating any possibility that Haley, one of the only viable contenders to Trump as of press time, could get votes in the caucus. (The party in September also changed its rules to say that candidates could not compete in both the caucus and the primary, and that the caucus will be the only means of awarding delegates to candidates.)

The absence of virtual competition alone is problematic for a democratic process. Moreover, the caucus raises questions about election security.

The Las Vegas Weekly contacted Michael McDonald, chairman of the Nevada Republican Party, to gain insight into why the party decided to hold a private nominating party through a caucus instead of using the state-run election–which the Secretary of State’s Office is required by law to hold. His answer referenced concerns about election security and the fact that Nevada does not require voters to present ID at the polls in order to cast their vote–concerns that Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo attempted to remedy with a bill in the 2023 legislative session.

Senate Bill 405 attempted to roll back a 2020 law that made it standard for Nevada to mail ballots to every active registered voter. (If it had passed, voters would have had to request mail ballots if they wanted them.) The legislation also would have instituted a requirement for Nevadans to show ID at the polls in order to vote in person, and a requirement to include the last four digits of a social security number or driver’s license number when using a mail ballot.

After four hearings, the governor’s bill never made it to a vote in either house of the Democrat-controlled Legislature.

“[It] basically got everyone upset in the sense that Republicans weren’t being heard. … And that’s when the caucus really caught hold,” McDonald said in a November 8 interview.

McDonald, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, is currently under indictment for fraud as a result of his leading role in the scheme to advance false Nevada electors for Trump.

After that initial interview, the Weekly tried several times to contact McDonald to gain further insight on how the party will ensure a secure and fair caucus process. McDonald never returned our calls.

But looking at the Nevada GOP’s website, it’s clear that the party is touting its caucus process as though it is even more secure than state-run primaries, pointing to the fact that it’s being held on a single day in person (no mail ballots except for military voters who can request an absentee ballot on the GOP’s website) and allows caucus-goers to participate only at the caucus site specific to their precinct.

And, of course, they’re very proud that the caucus will require voters to present government-issued ID.

Let’s take a closer look at the argument for voter ID. Proponents, many Republicans, purport that requiring government-issued identification at the polls prevents voter fraud. But, working with our colleagues at the Las Vegas Sun, the Weekly set out to demonstrate just how easy it would be to circumvent such a “security” measure.

For only $110 on a publicly accessible website, the Weekly obtained a fake identification card under the name of Michael McDonald. With no intention to actually use the card, we went through the scenario: What if we used this fake ID to vote?

Let’s say we showed up to the caucus before the real Michael McDonald, used our fake ID to check in and proceeded to participate in the caucus—which is essentially a community meeting where participants make pitches for their candidates in attempts to convince their neighbors to vote for them. Because the caucus is not a single event, like casting a vote, but rather a series of conversations and realignments, there would be no way of curing the participation of the hypothetical fraudulent voter after the fact.

Primaries across the country over many decades have proven and tested measures like signature curing to verify the identity of voters and remove improperly cast ballots from counts after elections. In contrast, caucuses do not have a known curing process after they’ve hypothetically discovered that someone had a fake ID or voted improperly.

“It’s an instance in time. It’s a community gathering at a certain location. And so, you’re all sitting in a room together during the process. There’s not much curing that can happen because it’s live,” Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar tells the Weekly.

Furthermore, because the caucus is not run by the state, it does not have access to state election security infrastructure like voter identification, which exists in the voter registration process. When a resident registers to vote in Nevada, they must provide information like their drivers license number, Social Security Number and signature to verify their identity. The Secretary of State maintains a database with all voter registration, which can be used to verify properly cast ballots.

Rather than relying on that database, which is updated nightly, the party will most likely use statewide voter rolls, available from the Secretary of State’s office, to cross check IDs and party registration. (The Nevada GOP set a deadline of January 8 for would-be caucus participants to register as Republicans. Anyone who registered after that date will not be eligible to participate in the caucus, per party rules.)

Although requiring ID to vote may seem like a solution to voter fraud, Democrats called the measure a “solution in search of a problem,” when Gov. Joe Lombardo attempted to pass his voter ID law through the Legislature in 2023.

Voting rights advocates for decades have denounced voter ID laws as both ineffective for security and charged that they are a means of suppressing the vote. Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel for the New York University-based Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program, says that while advocates for voter ID say the measure prevents voter fraud, voter fraud is “exceedingly rare.”

“Voter impersonation is virtually non-existent. You’re more likely to be hit by lightning. And any instances of irregularity are more likely to just be mistakes by voters or election administrators that can be corrected, and not any kind of intentional effort to defraud our electoral system,” she says.

“Not only is voter ID [an] overall bad policy for every voter, but [also] it’s particularly burdensome for specific groups of voters that are already confronting a number of barriers to the ballot box,” Sweren-Becker adds.

In a January 10 press conference at the Clark County Election Department, Aguilar reiterated that there is no evidence of widespread fraud in Nevada or anywhere else. And he tells the Weekly that calls for voter ID are actually a distraction from implementing security measures through mail ballots–the most widely used voting system in the state. With mail ballots, a single ballot is sent to each voter in the state, by itself helping to limit fraud.

“I can see why people understand [voter ID] and think that it’s a solution to all of it. But it’s not. When you start to break it down and you start to understand the nuances, it starts to become irrelevant in the long term,” Aguilar says. “[It] becomes kind of a red herring because, as more Nevadans adopt universal mail ballot … what we really need to be focusing on is the technology of those ballots, the tracking of those ballots and the processing of the ballots.”

In the event that voter fraud takes place, the attorney general’s office has reminded voters that it is a felony. It will be investigated and prosecuted, Ford said at the January 10 press conference.

“I want to emphasize the point that I have consistently maintained since the 2020 election and subsequent false conspiracy theories regarding widespread voter fraud. Any allegation of voter fraud is one that my office takes very seriously,” Ford said, pointing to seven instances where the attorney general’s office has prosecuted for voter fraud since 2016.

“If you have evidence of voter fraud, of someone voting twice or of similar allegations, I urge you to file a complaint with the Secretary of State or through my office, and do it with post-haste. We will investigate, and if the allegations have merit, we will prosecute,” Ford said.

But where there is a system to catch bad actors in the primaries, the same system (voter identification, registration database and signature curing), does not exist in the caucuses. In the caucuses, there doesn’t have to be a consequence for voter fraud—unless the Nevada GOP were to bring such a case to the state to be investigated.

Voter fraud in a primary is clearly a felony in Nevada; however, it’s less clear whether it would be a felony to vote fraudulently in a private event like the GOP caucuses. Some kinds of fraud are illegal, but just as no other state has ever done what the Nevada Republicans are doing, it remains unclear what legal protections exist.

“That system and that process is solely managed by the party,” Aguilar tells the Weekly. “If they bring us the case, I believe we can then look at the case and use our investigators to investigate the situation, and then send it over to the Attorney General’s office of the [District Attorney]’s office in the local county.”

Aguilar adds that his office uses best practices to ensure accessible voting—early voting, universal mail ballots, allowing for voter registration at the polls and allowing voters to vote outside their home precinct.

“When you want to get the greatest perspective of what voters want, you want to be as inclusive and as accessible as possible. And I think the primary system makes that feasible,” Aguilar says.

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