Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar has several bills he’s trying to pass related to elections, AI and child care. KUNR’s Lucia Starbuck sat down with him in Carson City to learn more about his legislation and moving up election deadlines.
Lucia Starbuck: I think AI will be a hot topic this session, and you have a bill that would require campaign ads, if the material uses AI, to have a notice, and you're calling it synthetic media. What does that mean?
Cisco Aguilar: It's artificial intelligence. Are you using a computer to alter the image, to generate an image? We just want voters to know that if they receive campaign material, they see campaign material, they hear campaign material, and it incorporates AI, that they know that it's AI.
Starbuck: We talk a lot about media literacy and fake news, but how do you tell something is made using AI?
Aguilar: It's going to be on the person generating the ad. They're going to have to disclose that, but if they choose not to follow the law, there's some accountability behind it. There's everything from fines, to personal liability, to criminal standards, and that's a conversation we want to make sure we're having, and that's why we look to other states as well.
Starbuck: Why not outright ban AI in campaign ads?
Aguilar: Because I don't think you can. You're going to limit somebody's free speech if you just outright ban it. But what is that minimum level or that standard that we can accept as a community, to accept AI?
Starbuck: Why do you think it's important for voters to know if there's AI in the ad they get in the mail, on TV, or on the radio?
Aguilar: Because sometimes that information could be to the detriment of the other candidate or the other campaign, and that's not fair. I'm all about competition. I'm all about trying to win a vote, but you got to make sure the information you're giving to a voter is accurate, and that that voter can rely on that information to make a good decision.
Lucia: Looking at another one of your bills, it would prohibit political action committees from using campaign funds for personal use. Isn't that already illegal for elected officials and candidates?
Aguilar: You're correct, and that's why we want to just make sure that we have complete standards and uniformity across campaigns and personal accounts to modernize our elections, to make sure that it's absolutely clear because when you get into these gray areas, is when problems persist.
Starbuck: I was really interested in another piece of that bill, which says that unspent campaign funds, elected officials can use that for child care, and elderly care, and health care premiums. Tell me more about that.
Aguilar: I think if you look at the members of our legislature, it's a citizen legislature. Our elected school boards are really volunteer positions, but we have individuals who have obligations outside their elected responsibilities, and but for the fact that they're elected, don't have the opportunity to cover some of these costs, and it's a burden on individuals. This is something that we looked at the Federal Elections Commission, we looked at their laws, and how do we bring Nevada into parity with some of the things that are happening on the federal level.
Starbuck: You also have a lengthy election bill that changes a number of things. What can voters really expect from that?
Aguilar: One of them is voter intent. On a mail ballot, if a voter puts an X on a bubble, we know that's their intent for the vote, but if it specifically says that it doesn't comply because it doesn't fill in the full circle, that their vote shouldn't count, that's crazy. We do have a second election bill that's going to come out, and that bill really deals with some of those issues we saw during the '24 election, such as processing times.
Starbuck: Will you tell me more about that bill?
Aguilar: I was pretty frustrated during the election, after the election, because I wanted voters to have real-time information, but I had to step back and make sure we got raw data from the counties to really understand where ballots were in the process. What are the bottlenecks? I think it's important for Nevadans to understand that in Washoe County, 98% of the ballots were on hand on election night. The county just didn't get to the processing of those ballots to be able to release those tabulation results. We know that about 2,100 ballots were received after Election Day. Ninety-five percent of those 2,100 ballots were received within 24 hours of Election Day, and there was a substantial immediate drop off of the number of ballots that we received the second, third and fourth day. That's not really the issue. That's insignificant to the overall count of all ballots.
Starbuck: It still took several days for some races to be called, like the U.S. Senate.
Aguilar: We have to remember that Nevada is a battleground state. We're a purple state. There are some races that are going to take extra diligence to make sure that the information we're providing to the public is accurate and correct, and so there will always be those races that take a little bit longer than the rest.
Starbuck: Are you prepared to push back on efforts to move up mail-in ballot deadlines?
Aguilar: I don't think it's pushing back. It's just getting the data to the decision-makers and explaining the data. Everything we're doing this legislative session, we tried to make non-political. We tried to say, how do we do things that are common sense and going to make Nevadans' lives easier.
