DHS confirms just 185 non-citizens on Nevada voter rolls after claiming thousands more

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has confirmed that only 185 non-citizens are registered to vote in Nevada, a stark reduction from the thousands initially alleged by the department and former President Donald Trump. This revelation comes after DHS officials met with Nevada election officials to discuss the claims.

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We’ve manually reviewed some of the 15,903 and confirmed 185 are not U.S. Citizens. We still have 14,000+ that still need additional review.

In July, Trump claimed in a televised address that a DHS review had identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote across four states. Subsequent letters sent to Nevada, California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey softened this assertion, presenting the figures as a ceiling of potential non-citizens rather than confirmed registrations. Experts had previously expressed skepticism, anticipating a significant drop in the confirmed numbers due to the lack of transparency in DHS's methodology.

DHS officials informed Nevada election officials that while an initial list suggested up to 15,903 non-citizens might be registered, a manual review had so far confirmed only 185. The department also shared an additional 6,218 individuals for whom a "higher confidence match" indicated they could be non-citizens, urging Nevada to begin reviewing these cases due to an approaching ballot mailing deadline.

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Weeks after the President held a national, primetime speech making sweeping claims regarding noncitizens and the security of our elections, DHS representatives informed our office that the numbers that were provided to the public are preliminary and that there is not high enough confidence to be able to share the full dataset with Nevada officials.

Nevada's Secretary of State, Francisco Aguilar, criticized the DHS for releasing preliminary numbers without high confidence, stating that his office would not risk disenfranchising eligible voters. The Guardian obtained recordings and emails that appear to contradict a DHS spokesperson's statement that the department had only confirmed 185 non-citizens. The spokesperson clarified that the 185 represented individuals who had undergone manual review, and the list shared with Nevada included others for whom a higher number of matching attributes suggested potential non-citizenship, provided at Nevada's request.

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The 185 are the individuals that had gone through manual review. The list shared with Nevada also included 6218 other individuals with the highest number of matching attributes. This was at the request of NV. They wanted to start with a subset less than the 15,903.