States Still Waiting for Proof After Trump's Noncitizen Voter Claims

More than a month after President Trump said in a primetime address that his administration found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in Nevada and three other states, those states were still asking federal officials for proof or a complete list of voters to investigate, NPR reported on August 25.

The gap between the public claims and what the Department of Homeland Security has been able to back up surfaced in detail on a video call between DHS officials and Nevada state election administrators. NPR obtained a recording and records of the call through a public records request. The New York Times first reported on the call.

On the call, DHS official Heather Honey, the administration's point person on noncitizen voting, told Nevada officials her team was working "in good faith" and said "we are an open book here." A DHS official on the call acknowledged that the roughly 16,000 noncitizens DHS initially said it had found on Nevada's voter list was "the ceiling" — meaning an upper limit — and that each voter still required manual review. Honey previously worked to push election falsehoods before her current post, NPR reported.

DHS had publicly announced the 16,000 figure for Nevada after a broader rollout that began July 17, when DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent letters to secretaries of state warning about potential noncitizens on voter rolls. DHS stated on its website that it had identified over 250,000 potential noncitizens illegally registered to vote in just four states, DHS said. The same DHS release reported 190,832 noncitizens registered to vote in the four states it named. Politico reported on July 16 that Mullin said his agency found thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls in four states ahead of a speech by Trump.

A day after the Nevada call, DHS provided the state with a list of 185 ID numbers for voters the agency said it was confident were noncitizens. Nevada then asked DHS for more information on those 185 voters and the data points used to match them to noncitizens. DHS declined to provide it. The agency told Nevada it still had more than 14,000 voters that "need additional review," NPR reported.

Mark Wlaschin, Nevada's deputy secretary of state for elections, said on the call that the state wants to avoid inadvertently accusing a U.S. citizen of not being a citizen and disenfranchising them — meaning removing their right to vote.

Pennsylvania had a similar experience. NPR confirmed that Pennsylvania officials held a call with DHS after Trump's July allegations, but Pennsylvania had not received a smaller list of potential noncitizens from the federal government. An official with knowledge of the Pennsylvania meeting said it was clear DHS did not have confidence that the numbers it stated publicly were accurate, NPR reported.

When NPR asked DHS and USCIS why the federal government touted numbers its own employees acknowledged were inflated, USCIS deferred to DHS, which did not comment. CNN correspondent Gabe Cohen fact-checked Mullin's claim that 250,000 noncitizens were on voter rolls in four states, CNN reported on August 22.

NPR reported on July 31 that the states in question said they did not know where the 250,000 figure came from.

The sequence — a headline figure announced at the White House level, a state-specific number that DHS later called a ceiling, a narrowed list of 185 names, and a refusal to share the matching methodology — places state election administrators in a bind. They are being asked to act on federal data they cannot verify, and the consequences of acting on bad data include removing eligible citizens from the rolls. Wlaschin's concern about disenfranchising a U.S. citizen is not hypothetical; it is the reason states run their own voter list maintenance processes and why verification standards matter.

The broader context here is a federal-state information gap that works against the operational needs of election officials. DHS has put a number into the public record, the president has amplified it, and the states that would have to act on it say they cannot get the underlying data to do the work. Whether the 185 ID numbers DHS provided to Nevada yield confirmed cases of noncitizen registration remains an open question, and DHS has not said when or whether the remaining 14,000-plus names will be resolved.