The recent statewide cyberattack took down many critical state websites and services, but at least one system was not affected: Nevada’s voter registration and backend election system.

That’s thanks to a 2021 law mandating that the secretary of state’s office move to a top-down voter registration system, a centralized database that collects and stores voter preregistration and registration information and is used by all 17 county clerks. The state previously had a bottom-up system, where each county individually tracked and recorded voter information, but it was long criticized for inefficiency.

Several years and millions of dollars in state funding later, the new system is up and running. State officials and cybersecurity experts say the adoption follows best practices by keeping election and voter information separate from other systems.

“Over the last two and a half years, we were preparing for what happened over the last couple of weeks,” Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, said in an interview. “Our systems were secure, and we met the expectation of the moment. As a high-profile office, when it comes to elections, a malicious actor is going to look to attack us in any way.”

Lawmakers initially allocated $30 million to the office to kickstart the project, and it has been phased in across the counties. Clark County implemented the system first in 2023, and the 16 other counties joined before the 2024 election. The office is now in the process of merging the Clark County voter registration database with the state’s, costing an additional $27 million.

Aguilar praised the work of county clerks to get this system implemented. 

“When somebody's done a certain task or a certain job they've been doing for a decade, coming in and making changes is hard, especially when you're short on staff, you're short on resources, it can be tough on people, and I'm super proud of the clerks for stepping up and putting in the hard work to make this all happen,” Aguilar said.

George Guthrie, the public information officer for the Washoe County Elections Department, said moving to the new system has been an “engaging” process.

“Some skepticism is expected whenever something new is introduced in elections,” Guthrie said. “Voter registration systems aren’t exactly front and center in the voter experience – but our new PollPads were a great example of showing voters the benefits of updating to a more modern technological standard.”

PollPads, implemented along with the new top-down system, are used at vote centers to register, look up and check in voters.

‘Best practices’

Sara Sandek, a cybersecurity and data privacy expert and a managing director at FTI Consulting, said as state and local governments become increasingly common targets of cybercriminals, keeping voter information separate from other systems is paramount — and should be constantly highlighted by election officials to maintain voter confidence.

“These types of attacks can have significant and serious impacts across essential government services,” she wrote in an email. “Election systems are typically isolated from other state systems. This is keeping in best practices with the numerous security and resiliency measures election officials prepare for to ensure the integrity of our elections.”

Aguilar said if Nevada needed to run an election during the type of situation the state was experiencing, that they could and that the data would be accurate and safe.

“When you build systems like these that are really high profile and need to be extremely secure, you try to figure out, how do you eliminate the vulnerabilities?” Aguilar said. “The way you eliminate vulnerability is making sure it doesn't have a lot of access points, and so that's why it was separate from all of the state systems.”

In addition to security, Aguilar said he’s hopeful the new system can help speed up the state’s much criticized slow process of counting and processing ballots. He said that on Election Day last year, 99 percent of the ballots cast in Clark County were counted and 90 percent of those were processed.

To let voters know where in the process their ballots are after being cast, he’s taken inspiration from, of all places, trackers from Domino’s and other pizza chains that show the status of an ordered pizza.

“It goes back to the simple concept of a pizza tracker. People know where their pizzas are in real time, right? People should know where their ballots are in real time,” he said. “They also should know where those ballots are in the process, so that if anybody wanted to look at any time, they could know that.”

Mark Wlaschin, the deputy secretary of state for elections, said the office had been working toward creating an independent election system “long before I joined the agency.” Ahead of the 2026 midterms and a closely watched gubernatorial race, he stressed that their work isn’t finished.

“The way we approach security is kind of a ‘pleased, but not satisfied’ mindset,” Wlaschin said. “There are numerous security enhancements that we continue to look at. I know our IT team, they spend a lot of time looking at what's cutting edge, what are the threats, not of today, but of next year, and how we can make sure that we're prepared and resilient to protect against those.”