Nevada Rejects DHS Claim That 185 Voters Are Non-Citizens

Nevada officials said the Department of Homeland Security incorrectly identified 185 people on the state's voter rolls as non-citizens. The finding, reported this week, followed a review by the Nevada secretary of state's office of 185 records sent by DHS. State officials concluded the individuals were U.S. citizens.

In a letter to the department, Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott wrote that "our records indicate that they were citizens. You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise" The Guardian.

The 185-person list was far smaller than earlier federal estimates. In July, Donald Trump said DHS had found a combined 278,000 non-citizens on voter rolls, the official lists of registered voters, in Nevada, California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Follow-up DHS letters to those four states said there could be as many as 278,000 non-citizens on the rolls, including up to 15,903 in Nevada The Guardian.

In August, DHS officials told staff in the Nevada secretary of state's office they had reviewed the numbers and narrowed the Nevada count to 185. At that same meeting, DHS officials said they still needed to review more than 14,000 Nevada records.

Nevada election officials said on Wednesday they had examined those 185 records and confirmed the individuals were U.S. citizens.

At issue is record linkage, the process of matching a person in one government database to the same person in another. Ott said DHS had not explained its method for flagging alleged non-citizens or shared enough information for the state to check the matches. When Nevada officials asked for first name, last name, address and any other data point DHS matched, DHS said it would only provide the voter ID number.

Ott wrote that a Nevada voter registration number can belong to more than one person because counties once kept separate systems before moving to a single statewide system with new voter ID numbers. A match on that number alone, like matching a house number without the street name, leaves the state unable to confirm identity with confidence.

Pennsylvania is asking similar questions. Election officials there pressed DHS for information on its basis for claiming as many as 14,576 non-citizens on its rolls. In an August letter, Pennsylvania's top election official Al Schmidt said DHS representatives had indicated they did not have "high confidence" in the 14,576 number The Guardian.

DHS had earlier said it identified more than 250,000 potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote in the four states Reuters. Separately, a review of state practices found that since 2000, U.S. states may have added more than 30,000 self-declared non-citizens to the nation's voter rolls Reuters.

The broader context here is a dispute over what counts as proof for list maintenance, the regular work of keeping voter rolls accurate. For election administrators who use these files daily, a statewide estimate and a verifiable referral are different tools. The first can come from bulk data matching. The second requires unique identifiers, a documented method and a file a county clerk can decide on.

Looking at what this means for federal-state coordination, the next steps turn on data sharing. Nevada wants the underlying match logic and additional fields. Pennsylvania wants the basis for its 14,576 figure clarified. Until DHS supplies match criteria, source systems and confidence levels in a form states can replicate, large top-line numbers are likely to face continued challenge from the officials who maintain the rolls.