Trump administration claimed more than 15K possible noncitizens registered to vote in Nevada; officials say they’ve confirmed under 200

Following a speech by President Donald Trump last month about alleged widespread election fraud, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that it had found “as many as” nearly 16,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Nevada.

Weeks later, the agency now says it has only confirmed 185 people it says aren’t citizens in the state’s voter records, describing the original number as a “ceiling.”

The new details were outlined in correspondence and a recording of a virtual meeting last week between federal officials and the Nevada secretary of state’s office, obtained through a public records request.

“Weeks after the President held a national, primetime speech making sweeping claims regarding noncitizens and the security of our elections, DHS representatives informed our office that the numbers that were provided to the public are preliminary and that there is not high enough confidence to be able to share the full dataset with Nevada officials,” said Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar in a statement.

“The Secretary of State’s Office will not risk disenfranchising eligible voters and ripping away their Constitutional right to vote without the highest confidence of their ineligibility,” he said.

The DHS contested Aguilar’s position that all the numbers were preliminary.

“This is false,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement. “The 185 are the individuals that had gone through manual review.”

During his July 16 speech, Trump said a DHS review had found more than 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in the U.S.

Without providing a numerical breakdown, a DHS memo declassified that day claimed that the agency had identified more than 250,000 of those alleged registered voters in just four states: Nevada, California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

A letter DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote to Aguilar that day was less succinct. The federal official said that a preliminary review of Nevada had found that “there may be as many as” 15,903 noncitizens in the state’s voter rolls.

Aguilar disputed the figure, describing it as “speculative at best.” The Nevada chief elections official then wrote to DHS asking for clarification about its methodology.

The explanation came in the form of a virtual meeting last week between Aguilar’s office and officials with the DHS and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Federal officials said they were conducting individual, manual reviews of possible noncitizens allegedly found in Nevada’s publicly available records, by cross-referencing them with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services records.

DHS official Kimberley Vogt told the Nevada officials that the 15,000-plus figure was preliminary.

“So, what you’re saying is that the 15,000 number has not been vetted?” asked Secretary of State’s Office Chief Deputy C. Murphy Hebert during the meeting. “Basically, it’s the number that you are starting (with)?”

Vogt said she wouldn’t describe it as that, because “we’ve done something with it to get down to 15,000.”

Mark Wlaschin, Nevada deputy secretary of state for elections, emailed the federal officials this week.

“We understand that the original 15,903 has been reduced to the 185 individuals, and that you’re still considering 6,218 others,” he wrote. “Please confirm.”

Vogt clarified that the DHS still had to manually review more than 14,000 would-be illegal voters in Nevada’s records. She sent the names of the 185 people whom the federal government said it had confirmed were noncitizens, and the names of 6,218 others it described as “higher confidence matches” it still needed to review.