EDITORIAL: Aguilar should stop hiding records on voter investigation
There’s a good reason to be suspicious when public officials slow-walk public records requests. It often means that they’re hiding something.
Conservative activist Chuck Muth recently sued Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar. He wants the secretary of state’s office to produce records related to a double voter investigation. Mr. Muth’s organization, Citizen Outreach Foundation, has been working on election integrity issues through its Pigpen Project.
Its research flagged a potential double voter in the 2022 election. In the spring of 2024, Mr. Muth filed an Election Integrity Violation Report on Charles Spillers. According to the lawsuit, records appeared to show that Mr. Spillers voted in both Texas and by mail in Nevada during the 2022 general election.
In June 2024, Mr. Aguilar’s office told Mr. Muth that it had completed its review of the complaint. It declined, however, to inform him of the result. In November, Mr. Muth filed a records request for documents related to the investigation.
What happened next is all too familiar to Nevada media outlets and watchdog groups. After months of delays, the secretary of state’s office produced some records, but not all of them, according to Mr. Muth.
After more than half a year of waiting, “the SOS is willfully and intentionally withholding public records,” Mr. Muth’s complaint states. His lawsuit also contends the secretary of state’s office referred this potential double-voting case to Attorney General Aaron Ford’s office for potential prosecution — in May 2024. But Mr. Ford’s office didn’t prosecute.
The stakes here go beyond the importance of the public’s ability to access government records. Using the same process that identified Mr. Spillers, Mr. Muth wrote that his organization “identified 881 individuals who filed an official, permanent change-of-address with the post office but nevertheless had a mail-in ballot cast in their names in Nevada’s 2024 general election.”
Whether this is true remains to be seen. But the politics at play are obvious.
Democrats, including Mr. Aguilar, have long downplayed Republican concerns about voter fraud. Certainly some Republicans have made wild, ridiculous and unsupported claims. But Mr. Muth’s organization isn’t seeking to overturn election results. The Pigpen Project has sifted through reams of government data and says it has identified potentially hundreds of cases of double voting. Certainly even skeptical Democrats might agree that, if true, this is concerning and worth further investigation.
Stonewalling records requests only stokes conspiracy theories and creates more uncertainty. The secretary of state’s office should release the documents.