The man who could save free and fair elections in Nevada was rushing to finish his breakfast. No one seemed to notice him.
It was this anonymity that belied the weight on the shoulders of Cisco Aguilar, a 45-year-old cherub-faced lawyer who is running to be Nevada’s top election official. Aguilar, a Democrat, is in the final stretch of the secretary of state race against Jim Marchant, a former Nevada lawmaker who has been one of the most prominent leaders of a movement to question the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
If elected Nevada’s top election official, Marchant, a Republican who is linked to the QAnon movement, has pledged that he and other like-minded secretaries will “fix” the country and secure a Donald Trump victory in 2024. He has also said elections in Nevada are run by “a cabal” and that Nevadans haven’t really elected a candidate for office since 2006. And he’s fueled distrust of voting equipment in the state, pushing rural Nevada counties to adopt costly and time-consuming hand counts of ballots. Recent polls have showed the race is extremely close.
The contest in Nevada is one of several nationally that include candidates who have spread baseless conspiracy theories while running to be secretaries of state. Those offices have long been overlooked as inconsequential, but they play an enormous role in overseeing how elections are run and votes are counted. If Marchant and similar candidates win in states like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania – all key battleground states – there are deep concerns they could use their positions to try to block anyone who defeats Trump, presumably running for president in 2024, from taking office.
Aguilar previously worked for tennis star Andre Agassi’s charitable foundation and the Nevada Athletic Commission, but has never run for public office before. On the campaign trail, he doesn’t quite have the formal polish of a politician. He’s still getting used to occasionally getting recognized – when he’s wearing suits, that is (his preferred footwear still appears to be colorful Nikes). He’s also getting used to speaking to large crowds. “I hate this,” he said, after addressing thousands at a packed rally headlined by Barack Obama. “I hope I didn’t scare anyone up there.”
But when he talks about the stakes of this election, his tone is serious.
“We may end up with somebody who we didn’t elect president as president,” Aguilar said at breakfast. “Marchant has stood on stage, standing next to Donald Trump, and said, ‘If I am secretary of state, Donald Trump will be the president in ’24,’ unequivocally. And to hear somebody make such an absolute statement, without truly understanding what the will of the voters is, is scary. It’s extremism at its greatest.”
Asked whether he expected Marchant to concede the race if he loses, Aguilar said he didn’t know.
“That’s the least of my worries. He’s not a serious candidate, but the threat he represents is extreme. And that’s what we’re fighting … the threat he represents,” he said.
Election denialism is elsewhere on the ballot in Nevada. Adam Laxalt, a Republican in a tight race for the US Senate, was Trump’s campaign co-chair in Nevada, spread election misinformation and helped lead legal efforts to try to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
That severe threat to democracy is part of the pitch Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren made to voters when they traveled here in the campaign’s final days to campaign for Aguilar and other Democrats in close races.
“Cisco’s opponent wants to make it harder to vote. He’s trying to one-up all the Republicans trying to peddle lies about the 2020 election by saying all elections in Nevada for the last 15 years have been fake. Really?” Obama said at the rally in North Las Vegas. “Vote for somebody like Cisco, who believes that every vote should count. Full stop. Shouldn’t be a radical idea.”
It’s a theme that resonates with voters like Helga Lott, an 80-year-old retiree in Las Vegas. Standing on her porch one afternoon, she said that threats to democracy were “the only issue” in this election.
“This time around we have to vote Democratic no matter what. The democracy is at stake,” she said. “If you get Republicans into the state government, they control the elections, and then they can do what Trump has been trying to do for two years.
“Even if the secretary of state were not to my liking right now, I could not vote for a Republican. You can’t vote for anybody who was an election denier who says it was stolen,” she added.
Despite that imminent danger, Aguilar acknowledged it can be difficult to get voters to pay attention to a secretary of state election. A number of Nevada Democrats are in highly competitive races this year, including contests for the US Senate and governor’s seat. Aguilar’s campaign has raised $2.3m – four times what Marchant has raised – but a small sum compared with that of a gubernatorial or senatorial contest. His campaign has three full-time staffers.
“From a very selfish perspective, I wish people were more engaged in the secretary of state’s race. But we’ve also had some amazing support as well,” he said. “We’d love to have the resources that the governor and the senator have, but we know the reality of the situation. That’s why we’ve had to work double-hard to continue to raise the resources we need to fight the battle we want to fight.”
Kevin Sebastian, 32, said he hadn’t had much of a chance to pay close attention to the secretary of state’s race, but he was concerned about the potential for a stolen election. “The bald-faced sort of denial of something that’s been verified, it makes me think about ideas about truth, ideas about trust. It makes me concerned about how people view information,” he said.
One of the groups supporting Aguilar is the powerful local culinary union, which has been deploying canvassers on behalf of Democratic candidates. After hearing Aguilar speak briefly at their union hall on Tuesday, two of those canvassers, Rawanda Rogers, a guest room attendant at a hotel, and her son Amari Bryant, 18, knocked on doors in a quiet neighborhood on the east side of Las Vegas, making sure people had a plan to vote.
After about an hour of canvassing, Bryant questioned how anyone could believe the election was stolen. “We work for it, like you see now,” he said. “We’re putting in the work.”
Marchant and his campaign did not respond to several inquiries.
But a vision of what elections could look like if Marchant is elected is already playing out in Nye county, a rural area of about 53,000 people and 34,000 active registered voters that Trump won easily in 2020. Earlier this year, Marchant appeared at a county meeting and convinced the commissioners to count their ballots by hand, falsely saying the machines could not be trusted. Experts have long warned that hand counts are less reliable than machine counts, take longer and are more costly.
When the count began in late October, things did not go smoothly.
There were numerous mismatched counts that had to be reconciled and a worker bemoaned that it took two hours to get through 50 ballots, according to the Associated Press. An observer from the ACLU was escorted out by an armed volunteer. The Nevada supreme court and secretary of state’s office quickly stopped the effort, saying it ran afoul of Nevada law preventing the disclosure of election results before the polls close.
“There are 60 random people touching my ballot and calling out who I voted for and I am livid,” said Catherine Lilly, 57, who runs a pest control company.
Outside of an early voting site in Pahrump, a desert town about an hour outside Las Vegas, some Nye county residents said a hand count was necessary to prevent cheating. Among them was Richard McDonough, a retired handyman, who said a hand count was needed “to prevent the theft of an election”.
“It’s pretty hard to cheat with a hand count,” he said, adding that he had been following news of the count on the far-right news networks like One America News, Real America’s Voice and Newsmax. “The machines are criminal. They’re produced by criminals, criminals buy them, criminals force us to use them.”
“I don’t see a problem with [a hand count]. It’s less chance of somebody messing with it. Too many scammers, spammers, all those people that are trying to screw with things electronically,” said Mike Zaman, 69. “As long as somebody’s watching over them. People are watching the people that are counting.”
Tricia Martin, a high school social studies teacher, said she wasn’t necessarily opposed to a hand count if it gave more people confidence in the results.
“I think if it makes people feel more secure that what’s going on is decent and good, it’s all right,” she said. “My concern is just the naysayers that the minute they don’t win, then it’s sour grapes.”
