Nevada state officials have challenged the Department of Homeland Security’s identification of non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls, finding that individuals flagged by the federal agency were actually U.S. citizens.
In July, former President Donald Trump stated that DHS had identified a combined 278,000 non-citizens across voter rolls in Nevada, California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Subsequent communications from DHS to individual states narrowed this claim, indicating there could be as many as 278,000 non-citizens across those four states, with up to 15,903 potentially in Nevada. In August, DHS officials informed Nevada’s secretary of state’s office that they had reviewed records and identified 185 individuals as non-citizens, though they indicated more than 14,000 additional records still required review.
Nevada election officials conducted their own examination of the 185 records provided by DHS and concluded all were U.S. citizens. Greg Ott, a deputy attorney general for Nevada, communicated this finding to DHS in writing this week, stating that the state’s records indicated the individuals were citizens and that DHS had provided insufficient evidence to suggest otherwise. Nevada officials have also criticized DHS for failing to disclose the specific methodology used to identify alleged non-citizens and for providing only voter identification numbers rather than more detailed information such as names, addresses, or other data points used in the matching process.
Nevada’s voter identification system adds complexity to the analysis, as the state transitioned to a unified statewide registration system and assigned new identification numbers to voters. The same number may correspond to different voter records across time periods, making it difficult to establish citizenship status based on the identifier alone. Election officials noted that registration records often contain incomplete or inconsistent information entered during initial registration, particularly for individuals who registered decades earlier.
Similar concerns have emerged in other states. Pennsylvania election officials have also questioned DHS’s methodology, with the state’s top election official indicating that DHS representatives acknowledged they did not have high confidence in claims regarding the number of non-citizens on Pennsylvania’s voter rolls.
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