Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar and his executive team presented the office's 2023-2025 budget to the Assembly Committee on Ways and Means and Senate Committee on Finance on Monday.

Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar is making a pitch to legislators to improve the office's systems.

The first major ask is to establish a top down Voter Registration and Election Management System, known as “V-REMS.”

“Right now, all 17 counties manage their registration processing systems, and then feed that information back to the Secretary of State's office. The point of VREMS is to make it top down so that voter registration will be conducted at the Secretary of State's office, all that data and information will be sent to the 17 counties,” explained Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar.

The Secretary of State's office is making a one-time $30 million request from the general budget to implement the roll-out VREMS.

The Secretary of State’s Office tell us that VREMS would include:

  • transition all counties to the same system
  • More consistent elections processes across Nevada
  • Increase communications between counties and the Secretary of State
  • Increase efficiency and transparency for public information.
  • More comprehensive duplicates from the statewide database.
  • More comprehensive voter history
  • Improved speed to register votes who have moved counties

The office is also requesting $15 million for the "Project Orion" initiative to overhaul Nevada's business licensing portal, known as Silverflume.

560,000 businesses manage their licensing and renewals through the Silverflume business portal, and it generates approximately $220 million in revenue annually.

Project Orion includes:

  • Logical and efficient process flow
  • Add vendor resources to fix the backlog of bugs at an accelerated pace and implement new features
  • Enhance customer service and reduce demand on state employees
  • Improve state and customer security
  • Increase state revenue

“This is an immediate need because of the fact that every Nevada business has to register with the Secretary of State's office through Silverflume. And, when the process is difficult, it's antiquated, it's not logical, it makes it harder and creates a burden on those business owners.in reality we should make it as easy as possible and as efficient as possible."

The Secretary of State's budget request also includes more competitive pay for new staff positions to support the elections and business portal teams.

Aguilar says they have been critically understaffed across all divisions, and it has created a backlog, impacting the office's ability to collect revenue.