Nevada is among a handful of states that meet several criteria for politically motivated scrutiny of its election processes.
One, it’s a swing state: Its race for governor this year is rated as a toss-up by the Cook Political Report, none of its four congressional districts is heavily Republican or Democratic, and the state is consistently up for grabs in presidential races.
Two, Nevada was one of just two states in 2024 whose counties used electronic voting machines almost exclusively (the other remains Louisiana); this year, they’ll all be using touchscreens that print reviewable ballot choices for scanning, an increasingly popular method across the U.S.
Three, it’s one of 14 states that don’t require or request voter ID, instead making voters sign a poll book upon checking in.
Given all this, building trust in Nevada’s elections could arguably necessitate an extra boost. On Friday, Washoe County provided — if not modeled — one way to provide the lift.
The county registrar of voters there released the results of its last 16 months of list maintenance: the routine practice mandated under federal law of local election jurisdictions keeping their voter rolls up-to-date and compliant with eligibility requirements. That sentence might come across as boring. In fact, if you were to search the websites of other large, local election offices around the country — Washoe County has nearly 500,000 residents — you wouldn’t find many mentions of “list maintenance” at all.
But it’s part of the process that makes elections trustworthy to begin with.
“While there may have been an absence of messaging prior to 2025, list maintenance has always been conducted,” a spokesman for Washoe County’s elections department, George Guthrie, told Declare. “We often see outside discussions taking place claiming how ‘Washoe County has dirty vote rolls,’ despite the lengthy efforts our staff undertakes to ensure we maintain a clean voter registration list. Because of the misunderstood nature of voter roll maintenance, I felt it in the best interests of the County to directly report the sheer volume of records affected.”
In Washoe County, those numbers are as follows: Between December 2024 and March 2026, 75,721 address confirmation notices were mailed to voters; 55,501 active voter registrations were moved to inactive status; and 25,012 inactive voter registrations were canceled after remaining inactive through two federal general election cycles.
Without context, these could seem like anything to an observer outside the election profession. They could seem reassuring: Tens of thousands of inactivated voters — seems like they’re on top of things! They could seem unconvincing: If I don’t trust Nevada’s election laws, why do these numbers even matter? Or they could seem like the ultimate low-cal sandwich, the nothingburger: 75,000 here, 25,000 there . . . what am I even looking at?
In the end, the point is that the process happens. The National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 federal law, makes it so throughout the United States. And the Nevada secretary of state’s office has recently promoted statewide list maintenance data more broadly.
“To put it simply enough, despite being such a crucial operation, it was my belief list maintenance operations were not receiving enough exposure,” Guthrie continued.
The suggestion that list maintenance operations don’t receive much exposure at all appears to be true in most election jurisdictions. The Maricopa County (Arizona) elections office under the leadership of former recorder Stephen Richer ran a PSA campaign in 2024 asking local voters to do their part by ensuring that their registrations were updated. But that’s a one-off example, in a world of politics that, one, has never provided much accommodation for news about government process; and, two, floods what little room there is, amid a modern media ecosystem of torrential downpours about every issue imaginable.
“Thousands of voter registration changes are made every single day in the United States. That means voter list maintenance is critical,” Richer told Declare. “Election officials have long done the work. I’m glad that counties like Washoe County are now sharing that work publicly.”
For what it’s worth, the general efforts of Nevada’s election officials to keep the process free of ineligible voters seem to have a high success rate. The Washington Post reported a few weeks ago, for example, that federal law enforcement officials identified fewer than 40 potential instances of noncitizens voting in the 2020 presidential election, as part of a voter fraud investigation the Department of Justice has now closed.