The Department of Homeland Security has significantly scaled back its claims regarding non-citizens registered to vote in Nevada. After alleging in a primetime address on July 16 that a DHS review found approximately 278,000 non-citizens registered across four states, the agency subsequently acknowledged that manual review had confirmed only 185 such individuals in Nevada.
DHS officials met with Nevada election officials for the first time last week to discuss the discrepancy. The agency described the original figure of 15,903 potential non-citizens as a ceiling rather than a confirmed count, stating that the higher number represented unvetted matches requiring additional review. According to DHS official Kimberley Vogt, the department had manually reviewed some of the flagged names and confirmed 185 were not U.S. citizens, with over 14,000 remaining under review. The department also provided Nevada with an additional 6,218 individuals flagged with higher confidence matches but not yet manually reviewed.
Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, stated that DHS representatives informed his office the publicly announced figures were preliminary and lacked sufficient confidence for sharing the complete dataset. Aguilar emphasized that his office would not risk disenfranchising eligible voters without the highest confidence of their ineligibility. DHS officials explained they had compared Nevada’s public voter rolls from July 2025 against internal immigration data from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, though critics including David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research said the administration had refused to justify its methodology or show its work.
During a subsequent meeting on August 14, Nevada elections officials pressed DHS representatives on the methodology used to identify non-citizens. DHS acknowledged the 15,903 figure was preliminary and had not undergone full manual review of each individual. The meeting remained generally cordial, though moments of tension emerged between state and federal officials regarding the administration’s approach to the voter verification effort.
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