| The 60 Second Version: → Gov. Joe Lombardo vetoed 87 bills in 2025, breaking his own record from 2023. → His 162 career vetoes across two sessions already exceed the prior record holder’s 97 across eight years. → A November 2025 special session passed a resolution asking voters to enshrine mail voting in the Constitution, a separate track from the voter ID amendment already headed to the 2026 ballot. → More than 950 candidates filed for office in March 2026, all of it searchable through the state’s own free public records systems. |
Picture the governor’s desk in the last days of a legislative session: stacks of bills waiting on a signature or a veto stamp, each one a small decision nobody outside the building is watching.
Multiply that scene by two sessions, add a special session called on short notice, and fold in the paperwork from nearly a thousand people who filed to run for office this year, and you have the real record of how Nevada is governed right now. None of it is secret. It sits in databases anyone can open, waiting for someone to actually read it.
Four entries in Nevada’s public record, June 2025 to November 2026.
The Record, In Order
| JUNE 2023 VETO RECORD | 75 vetoes Lombardo’s first legislative session as governor ends with a then-record 75 vetoes, the opening entry in what becomes a pattern. |
| JUNE 2025 VETO RECORD | 87 vetoes Lombardo breaks his own record: 87 vetoes out of 605 bills, signing the other 518, an 85.6 percent approval rate. His two session career total, 162, already tops Brian Sandoval’s 97 across four sessions and eight years, in half the time. |
| NOV 13-19, 2025 SPECIAL SESSION | 7 day session Lombardo calls a special session for unfinished business. His crime bill passes 16 to 2. A film tax credit expansion fails 10 to 8 in the Senate. A corporate home purchase cap dies in the Assembly. In the final hours, lawmakers pass Senate Joint Resolution 1, a constitutional mail voting amendment unrelated to the governor’s call. As a resolution, it cannot be vetoed. |
| MARCH 2-13, 2026 CANDIDATE FILING | 950+ candidates Nevada’s ten day filing window closes with more than 950 non-judicial candidates on record, over 1,100 counting judicial races. That includes six Republicans challenging Lombardo and four Democrats challenging then-frontrunners Aaron Ford and Alexis Hill. |
| NOV 2026 BALLOT MEASURE | 2 ballot tracks A voter ID amendment, initiated by citizen petition, returns to the ballot for its second and final vote. SJR1’s mail voting protections, on the separate legislative track, will not reach voters until 2028 at the earliest, and only if lawmakers pass it again in 2027. |
Bills vetoed by Gov. Lombardo, by legislative session. Source: Nevada Legislature, reported by The Nevada Independent.
Career veto totals by governor and years served. Source: Nevada Legislature records, reported by Great Basin Sun.
The chart is not a fluke. Lombardo has now vetoed more bills in four years than any Nevada governor vetoed in eight, and legislative leaders have signaled they expect the pace to continue into the 2027 session, when both the film tax credit fight and SJR1’s second required vote return to Carson City.
Every veto is itself a short public document, a letter explaining why the governor rejected a specific bill, and those letters are just as searchable as the bill text they respond to.
What happens next depends less on any single veto than on the two ballot measures now queued up for Nevada voters. If SJR1 clears the Legislature again in 2027, the state will be asking voters to settle two competing visions of how elections should run: stricter identification at the polls, already headed to a second vote in 2026, against wider protections for mail voting, still a session away from reaching the ballot at all.
Both proposals start in the same building. Only the paper trail shows they are moving at completely different speeds.
How To Find It Yourself
- Bills and vetoes: NELIS, the Legislature’s free bill tracking system, lists every bill’s full history, vote counts, and veto messages back to 2011.
- Special sessions and executive orders: The Governor’s Office publishes every proclamation and executive order in full on its Newsroom page.
- Candidate filings and election results: The Secretary of State’s elections division posts every candidate filing and certified result, searchable by office and county.
- Attorney General opinions: Formal legal opinions from the Attorney General’s office are published in full and searchable by year.
- Everything else: Open.NV.Gov, the state’s transparency portal, indexes budgets, spending, and additional agency records in one place.
The Bottom Line
None of this required a records request. Every entry came from a page any Nevadan can open for free, most updated the same week it happens. The paper trail isn’t hidden. It’s just rarely read past the headline.
Methodology
The 162 career veto total (87 plus 75), the 85.6 percent approval rate (518 divided by 605), and the years-to-record comparison against Brian Sandoval were calculated by Two Nevadas by combining figures from the Nevada Legislature and contemporaneous news reporting linked above. None of these totals appear pre-calculated in any single source.
Two Nevadas. Independent local reporting. All figures sourced directly to the issuing agency or organization.
