The budget submitted Monday by the Secretary of State’s office to the Nevada Legislature includes $45 million for updates to two major systems affecting voter registration and elections and business licensing.
The two projects are just part of a total two-year budget request put forth by Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar and his executive team.
“Updating the state’s technology is critical to ensuring our government is transparent and accessible – Nevadans deserve systems that work for them and doesn’t make their lives harder,” Aguilar said.
Updating voter and elections systems would cost about $30 million under Aguilar’s plan. If approved by legislators, it would cover the cost of technology and vendor costs for VREMS, short for Voter Registration and Election Management Solution.
VREMS would help the SOS comply with Assembly Bill 422, passed in the 2021 session, which moves the state to a top-down voter registration system. Nevada currently allows each county to manage their own voter registration database and use their own election management systems.
Aguilar and his team said using the top-down VREMS system would speed up reporting election results, reduce the number of provisional ballots, help counties to maintain records and get rid of duplicate voters, among other benefits.
Another $15 million was requested for Project Orion, which would provide updates to SilverFlume, the state’s business licensing portal. The updates included in the project would fix a backlog of bugs in the system, improve customer service, and make the process flow in the system more logical.
Aguilar said he expects the improvements to SilverFlume to result in increased revenue for the state. SilverFlume brought $200 million into the state’s general fund in 2022.
Other items included in the SOS office’s budget request include new staff to support the elections and business licensing teams, a mail ballot tracking and notification system, a website redesign, and access to language translation services.
Source: Nevada Secretary of State
