When the Department of Homeland Security sent Nevada a list of 185 names last month that it claimed identified noncitizens who had been improperly allowed to register to vote, state election officials got to work.
On Tuesday, the state sent a strongly worded rebuke to the federal government: Every single person on the list was a lawful citizen.
“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” Greg D. Ott, a deputy attorney general in Nevada, wrote, according to a copy of a letter sent to Department of Homeland Security officials obtained through open records requests. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”
Mr. Ott also stated that D.H.S. officials had still not provided enough data for election officials to investigate their claims. Nor have they turned over the list of nearly 16,000 individuals they claim may be noncitizens.
“Our records do not support DHS’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that,” Francisco Aguilar, the Democratic secretary of state in Nevada, said in a statement. “Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.
It was the Trump administration’s latest stumble in a broad campaign to find proof of widespread noncitizen voting in American elections, despite decades of evidence that it is extremely rare.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Nevada’s characterization was “false” and “the list of 185 were simply a subset of individuals that had gone through a rigorous manual review process” at the time of the last meeting between the two agencies.
The back and forth began in July, when President Trump and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, said they had identified more than 270,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states: Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Both men stated the claims as fact, yet letters sent to election officials in the four states in the days that followed indicated that the numbers may have been inflated. Each letter qualified Mr. Trump’s concrete assertions with the phrase “there may be as many as.” None offered actual proof of noncitizens on voter rolls.
In Nevada’s case, Mr. Mullin initially claimed that there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls. But in a meeting between Nevada election officials and the Department of Homeland Security last month, department leaders admitted that their initial claim was unsubstantiated. That prompted some pointed questions from Nevada election officials, according to a video recording of the virtual meeting.
“So what you’re saying is the 15,000 number has not been vetted?” asked C. Murphy Hebert, the chief deputy in the Nevada secretary of state’s office.
“I probably wouldn’t use the sentence, ‘It hasn’t been vetted,’” replied Kimberley Vogt, an official with Homeland Security. “Because definitely we’ve done something with it to get down to 15,000. So I wouldn’t say that. But it hasn’t had a full manual review of each one.”
Following the meeting, Ms. Vogt sent a clarifying email to Nevada officials. “I also wanted to be sure I clarified that we did not reduce the 15,903 to 185,” she wrote. “We’ve manually reviewed some of the 15,903 and confirmed 185 are not U.S. Citizens.”
Now, Nevada officials are saying even that 185 number is wrong. They also took issue with a letter D.H.S. sent them in early September, in which the agency reiterated its initial claims about nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the rolls and pressured state officials to review each case in a letter to Nevada officials in early September.
“Each one of the 15,903 individuals identified should be carefully reviewed by your state to determine eligibility for voting in a federal election,” read a letter from the Department of Homeland Security sent on September 9.
But Nevada election officials said in their letter that D.H.S. “has never provided Nevada with a list of 15,903 individuals.” Instead, they said, the department sent them a smaller batch of roughly 6,000 individuals, identified only by what Homeland Security called a voter case number.
“D.H.S. still has not provided any additional verifiable information for the individuals it suggests are noncitizens,” they wrote.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the 6,218 individuals had “the highest number of matching attributes” to a potential noncitizen in their records, and that the smaller tranche of voters “was at the request of Nevada. They wanted to start with a subset less than the 15,903 registrants DHS originally identified.”
Nevada officials disputed that claim, and records reviewed by the Times did not show Nevada making that request.
Mr. Ott also said the use of so-called voter case numbers, which Nevada officials took to mean voter registration numbers, was imprecise.
Using only “voter case numbers” without any other information such as a name, date of birth, address, or another verifiable data point, could lead to the identification of multiple individuals, Mr. Ott said. This is because Nevada recently transitioned to a statewide voter-registration system that was previously run by counties. So an individual may have been assigned one number by a county in the past and a different number under the new statewide system.
“The number also doesn’t tell us whether an individual was born in the United States, naturalized, derived citizenship through a parent, or holds any particular immigration status,” Mr. Ott wrote. “A number that matches a voter record thus establishes only that a number exists in, or once existed in, a voter registration system.”
Mr. Trump’s demand for evidence of fraud has prompted multiple governmental efforts. The New York Times this month reported that hundreds of agents with Homeland Security had been temporarily pulled from their duties investigating international crimes and terrorism for a roughly three-week intensive search noncitizens on voter rolls. The methodology was criticized by Democrats as faulty and potentially illegal, and the Virginia attorney general wrote a letter demanding more information.
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