Nevada's flagged voter list yields 185 confirmed non-citizens after DHS review

Nevada declines to purge voters without ‘highest confidence’ of ineligibility

The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed to Nevada election officials that only 185 non-citizens appear on the state’s voter rolls, after manually reviewing some names on a flagged list of 15,903 and leaving more than 14,000 names still requiring additional review, according to records obtained by The Guardian.

The confirmation came about a month after President Donald Trump claimed in a July 16 primetime address that a DHS review had identified about 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in four states — Nevada, California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In follow-up letters to those states, DHS softened that claim, describing the figure as a “ceiling” of potential non-citizens rather than a confirmed count.

The Guardian on Friday published details of DHS’s communications with Nevada, including a recording of a meeting between DHS officials and Nevada election officials and emails obtained through a public records request. In an email sent Thursday, DHS official Kimberley Vogt told Nevada election officials: “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.”

DHS also shared with Nevada an additional 6,218 individuals whose information had not been manually reviewed but for whom the department had made a “higher confidence match” that they could be non-citizens. The department offered those names “in case you might want to start reviewing those since it was mentioned on the call that you have a quickly approaching deadline to mail out ballots,” according to the email.

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, said in a statement that DHS officials told his office the numbers provided to the public were “preliminary” and that the department lacked “high enough confidence to be able to share the full dataset with Nevada officials.”

“The Secretary of State’s Office will not risk disenfranchising eligible voters and ripping away their Constitutional right to vote without the highest confidence of their ineligibility,” Aguilar said.

A DHS spokesperson said in a statement it was “false” to say the department had confirmed more than 185 non-citizens on the list. The spokesperson explained that the 185 “are the individuals that had gone through manual review” and that the 6,218 additional names were shared “at the request of NV” as a subset for Nevada to begin reviewing before the full list was complete.

At an August 14 meeting between Nevada and DHS officials, Nevada elections director Mark Wlaschin and other state staffers pressed the federal government to explain how it had flagged potential non-citizens. DHS officials said they compared Nevada’s public voter rolls from July 2025 to internal immigration data from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services. On the call was Heather Honey, whom The Guardian described as “a prominent election denier” known for “misleading research into voter records,” who now works at DHS.

The meeting also surfaced disagreement over the vetting status of the 15,903 figure. C. Murphy Hebert, Nevada’s chief deputy secretary of state, asked DHS officials to clarify whether the 15,000-number was a ceiling on potential non-citizens.

“What you’re saying is the 15,000 number has not been vetted, basically. It’s the number that you are starting with,” Hebert said.

“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,” Vogt replied. She acknowledged the 15,903 number was “preliminary” and there had not been a “full manual review” of each name. “It’s a lot of work to go one by one. I’m sure you can imagine,” she said. “We don’t just have, you know, like a thousand people to drop from the sky and parachute in and help us out with that. So we are making our way through it.”

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a non-profit focused on election administration, said: “The administration continues to make baseless claims of widespread noncitizen voting, and every time, they refuse to show their work or justify their methodology. In Nevada, and every other time, when states demand evidence and transparency, the administration’s claims wither away to small numbers.”

The DHS communications with Nevada follow a July 15 press conference in which DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened election officials with fines and prison time if they did not comply with efforts to remove voters from the rolls.

During the August meeting, Wlaschin asked DHS officials to confirm that none of them had been referred for criminal investigation.

“You are addressing this, and we think that you’re doing so in good faith. And of course the Department of Homeland Security would just not have the statutory authority to charge an election official; we don’t do enforcement of those particular laws,” Honey said. “We have made no criminal referrals.”

While the meeting between state and federal officials seemed cordial, there were a few moments of underlying tension between the Trump administration and many state election officials. At one point, Wlaschin interrupted a DHS official to correct the pronunciation of Nevada.

“I’d be remiss and every fellow Nevadan would lose their mind if I didn’t correct you. It’s said Nevada, not Nevahda,” Wlaschin said. “I grew up on the East Coast; I’m sure I got it wrong at first, but Nevada, if you don’t mind, please.”

Later in the meeting, DHS official Nicolas Bartell complimented Nevada on the quality of its voter data compared to other states, declining to name them. “We don’t name and shame,” Bartell said. “Except in the press releases,” Hebert interjected. “I leave that to the Department,” Bartell replied.