On Wednesday, the state's newly implemented Voter Registration and Election Management Solution, VREMS, officially went live.
In 2021, the Nevada legislature moved to establish a centralized voter registration system, specifically by the 2024 presidential election.
VREMS is replacing decades-old "bottom-up" voter registration systems maintained by Nevada's counties with a "top-down" centralized system across all 17 counties.
The goal is to improve speed and accuracy in maintaining secure voter rolls across the state.
Voters will only see the front end of system when they register at check-in, but on the back end, the state will have a complete look across all voting centers in Nevada.
"I can look at who's voting, who's not, and what district is having a large turnout. What polling locations are doing," said (D) Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar.
New voter registration will update in real-time, allowing the state to track voters who move to a new county instantly.
"It will help us from a double vote perspective. If somebody tries to vote in Lander County and shows up in Washoe County, the system will catch that because it's operating in real-time," said Aguilar.
The new VREMS voter registration front-end technology will make it much easier for Nevadans to check in and update their registration at voter centers.
"It takes a lot of error because these are full proof of trying to find a voter. There's different ways you can do it. There are advanced searches; there's typing it. But if you don't know or can't quite understand two letters of the first or last name, guess what you can find it," explained Washoe County Interim Registrar of Voters Cari Ann Burgess.
With all 17 counties connected to the VREMS database, the state is in a better position to step in to investigate issues.
"This system allows us to bring it to the forefront to allow us to have unified reports, to look at the data through the state, and to look at certain precincts from a website that we have access to," said Aguilar.
In June, coding errors occurred before the Presidential Preference Primary (PPP), resulting in inaccurate voter registration history. However, these errors did not affect the PPP results. Aguilar stated that the new system has eliminated the opportunity for such coding issues.
"Those issues occurred because of those 17 separate systems that each of the counties had. 17 Systems are trying to feed into one system at the state level. The coding is different from county to county. There is only one system now," said Aguilar.
The new VREMS system only applies to new voter registration. Voter tallying or counting will continue to be done at the county level. The secretary of state's office emphasized the need for decentralized vote counting.
