DHS: Nevada has 185 confirmed noncitizen voters, down from 16,000

By Liam Hibbert
The Center Square

The list of noncitizen voters in Nevada has fallen to 185 from a potential list of nearly 16,000 after revisions from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

But the department noted the 185 figure strictly refers to those who were manually reviewed during a labor-intensive process and that another 6,218 were "high confidence" or likely noncitizen voters that would be reviewed.

Last month, DHS announced a list of 250,000 potential noncitizen voters from four states - Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But it has since revised its number of noncitizen voters to 185 individuals in later private communications with the Secretary of State’s Office. The reversal comes amid wider efforts to question voter rolls and systems across the country ahead of November’s midterm elections.

“As President Trump announced last night, DHS has identified over 250,000 potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote in just 4 U.S. states,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a July 17 press release. “Only Americans should be electing American leaders.”

Mullin told The Center Square that noncitizen voters is a serious concern. “We’ve put these governors on notice. States must work with us to ensure free, fair, and honest elections."

The DHS report said that between California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania, over 250,000 noncitizens may be registered to vote. Of those, 15,903 were in Nevada, according to DHS.

But a Nevada official criticized the DHS report for creating fear with inaccurate information.

“It's not legitimate. It's not accurate. It's not done with the true intention of trying to create a better process or a better system,” Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar told The Center Square. “What it's doing is designed to scare voters. It's designed to create chaos. It's designed to allow the president to choose his voters rather than voters choosing the elected.”

Earlier this month in a private Aug. 13 meeting between staff members for the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office and DHS, DHS staff explained that the list of 15,903 potential Nevada noncitizen voters was made by doing a preliminary comparison of the Nevada voter roll to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, adding the figure was a "ceiling" for noncitizen voters in the state.

The Secretary of State's Office said it recorded a video of the Aug. 13 meeting and that everyone at the meeting knew they were being recorded. That's confirmed with a thread of emails that was sent to The Center Square, showing comments from DHS and the Secretary of State's Office.

The office sent the video to The Center Square, which watched the recording.

“What you’re saying is the 15,000 number has not been vetted, basically?” Murphy Hebert, chief deputy of the Secretary of State's Office, said during the DHS meeting.

“I probably wouldn’t use the sentence, ‘It hasn’t been vetted’, because definitely we’ve done something with it to get down to 15,000,” DHS official Kimberley Vogt responded. “But it hasn’t had a full manual review for each one [voter]. It’s a lot of work to go one-by-one, I’m sure you can imagine.”

After the meeting, a new DHS list of only 185 reportedly confirmed noncitizens from the initial 15,903 was sent to the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office, with an additional 6,218 “high confidence” noncitizen voters.

The Center Square reached out to DHS, which noted the 185 were individuals who were manually reviewed and that 6,218 others on the list had the highest number of matching attributes for being potential noncitizen voters. The department said it compared voters' rolls against its lists of illegal immigrants.

DHS staff told the Nevada Secretary of State’s staff members during the meeting that the potential illegal voters list was based on names, phone numbers, addresses and birthdates. When later pressed over email for information on how the 185 reported noncitizen voters were determined, Vogt said they would only be providing voter ID numbers.

Talks between the DHS and the Secretary of State's Office have since broken down, Aguilar told The Center Square.

Aguilar said the potential noncitizens voter lists were being used as a tool to create fear among Latino voters to keep them from the polls by the Trump administration.

“When you add additional pressures and additional stresses to outside activities, they're going to think twice about participating,” Aguilar said of Latino voters in Nevada. “They're going to say this is not worth the stress, this is not worth the potential of creating a situation I may not want to be in – so they're self-selecting out.”

He tied the issue to speculation of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents standing guard at polling stations in Nevada, arguing that even the potential of their presence would dissuade some Latino voters in the state.

Aguilar said his office was open to further communication with DHS and potentially to their own investigations into the noncitizen voter list, if DHS provided the additional information requested as to how they concluded the 185, from the original list of 15,903 individuals, were illegal voters.

Aguilar said the state would go ahead with this year’s election as planned. Nevada’s early voting starts Oct. 17, with election day set for Nov. 3.