About a month after alleging that Nevada had as many as 16,000 non-citizens on its voter rolls, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials have confirmed that only 185 were actually non-citizens, according to records obtained by the Guardian.
In a primetime TV address on 16 July, Donald Trump claimed that a DHS review had found approximately 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in four states, including Nevada. In follow-up letters to the states, DHS stated this figure represented a ceiling of potential non-citizens.
Kimberley Vogt, a DHS official, wrote to Nevada election officials on Thursday that 185 individuals had been manually reviewed and confirmed as non-US citizens. She added that over 14,000 names still required additional review. The department also sent the state an additional 6,218 people with a “higher confidence match” who had not yet been manually reviewed.
Francisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state, stated that DHS representatives informed his office that the numbers provided to the public were preliminary and lacked sufficient confidence to share the full dataset with Nevada officials. He added that his office would not risk disenfranchising eligible voters without the highest confidence of their ineligibility.