Nevada Launches Statewide Unified Voter Registration System

By Matt Cohen

A U.S. voter registration form is shown up close, with a hand holding a pen about to fill out the sheet. (Adobe Stock)

Registration information for voters in every county in Nevada is now collected and stored into a centralized, top-down database, making it easier and faster for election officials across the state to keep accurate voter rolls. 

The new system, called Voter Registration and Election Management Solutions (VREMS), officially debuted on Saturday, three years after the state’s legislature unanimously passed a bill to overhaul how the state maintains its voter registration data. At the time of the bill’s passage, the project was given a 2024 deadline to launch. Under the new system, rather than counties having their own systems for doing list maintenance for voter rolls, each county is now part of what’s known as a “top-down” voter registration system that involves each county uploading their voter registration data into a statewide database. 

“Instead of having, you know, 17 different systems doing list maintenance for our voter rolls, we have a single system now that allows us to directly manage that information and have a streamlined, unified process across the state for list maintenance,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D) said of the new system, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. 

VREMS was first scheduled to launch in April, ahead of the state’s primary elections, but was delayed at the behest of various county clerks and election officials to fine tune some issues. 

“Elections are the foundation of our democracy, and when the administrators of those elections express concern we should all listen,” Aguilar said in a statement when the launch was delayed. “I know that this request from our state’s election administrators was not made lightly, and that it was made with the voters in mind.”

Right-wing “election integrity” groups like the Pigpen Project have recently tried to bring voter roll challenges to a number of counties in Nevada, using incomplete data from VoteRef, an online database of semi-public voter information that’s proven unreliable. Under the new VREMS system, it makes it harder for right-wing groups to bring challenges to voter registration rolls, since each county’s data now lives on a statewide basis. 

“I think it helps ensure that we’re counting every vote across the state,” Aguilar said of the system. 

Learn more about the right-wing groups challenging voter registration rolls here.