KVIG Informative

The Trump administration threatened to prosecute Nevada election officials over what it called nearly 16,000 illegal noncitizen voters. Records the state released show federal officials could only confirm 185 — and hadn’t finished checking the rest.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security told Nevada election officials on a video call earlier this month that it had confirmed only 185 potential noncitizens among the state’s voter rolls, far below the nearly 16,000 the agency had publicly claimed weeks earlier, according to records Nevada’s secretary of state released in response to a public records request.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced last month that the administration had identified more than 250,000 “potential” noncitizens on voter rolls across four states, including 15,903 in Nevada, and threatened to prosecute state election officials who did not turn over sensitive voter data.

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On the call, DHS official Heather Honey told Nevada officials the original nearly 16,000 figure represented “the ceiling,” and that every name still required manual review. A day later, the agency sent the state a list of 185 voter ID numbers it said it was confident belonged to noncitizens, along with more than 14,000 additional names still marked as needing further review and more than 6,000 described as “higher confidence” matches that had not yet been reviewed.

Nevada Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Mark Wlaschin asked DHS for the underlying data points used to match the 185 voters, including names, dates of birth and addresses. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services fraud division chief Kimberly Vogt declined the request, saying the agency preferred to limit its information sharing to the voter ID numbers themselves.

DHS explained its methodology was based on matching names, dates of birth, addresses and phone numbers from Nevada’s publicly available voter file against USCIS immigration records — a process that, by the agency’s own account on the call, remains incomplete for the vast majority of the names it originally flagged.

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The gap between the administration’s public claim and its own confirmed findings arrives as the U.S. Department of Justice separately sues Nevada in a related case, demanding the state’s full, unredacted voter file, including the last four digits of registered voters’ Social Security numbers — a request Nevada’s attorney general has moved to dismiss.

Secretary Mullin’s public number was 15,903. The agency’s own internal count, shared directly with the state it was threatening to prosecute, was 185 confirmed and more than 14,000 still unreviewed. Nevada’s voter rolls haven’t changed. The federal government’s math has.