DHS official tells Nevada the 16,000 noncitizen voter figure was 'the ceiling'

States asked DHS for matching data on 185 voters; agency declined

A Department of Homeland Security official leading the Trump administration’s effort to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls acknowledged to Nevada election officials earlier this month that her agency’s initial figure of roughly 16,000 such voters in the state was a “ceiling,” with each match still requiring manual review, according to records and a recording of the call obtained by NPR and The New York Times.

In the video call with the Nevada Secretary of State’s office, Heather Honey, a DHS official who previously worked to push election falsehoods before joining the agency, told the state officials that her team was “acting in very good faith” and described the agency as “an open book.” The acknowledgment came more than a month after President Trump, in a primetime address, said his administration had identified more than 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls of Nevada and three other states combined.

DHS initially announced it had found close to 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter list. In the call, a DHS official said that figure was the upper bound and that each voter still needed to be manually reviewed, according to NPR. A day after the meeting, the agency sent Nevada a list of 185 ID numbers pertaining to voters it said it was confident were noncitizens.

Nevada then asked for the matching data — the first name, middle name, last name, date of birth, address and any other data points used to identify those 185 voters. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services declined. “We’d prefer to limit our information sharing to just providing you the voter ID from your public voter list,” USCIS official Kimberly Vogt wrote in correspondence, according to NPR.

Nevada responded that it could not act on the limited information. “We are unable to conduct an analysis without real verifiable information,” Wlaschin wrote in an Aug. 20 email.

Wlaschin, Nevada’s deputy secretary of state for elections, told the DHS officials on the call that vetting was as important as the integrity goal itself. “The integrity of the electoral process in our state is of supreme importance,” he said. “The vetting is also equally important, though, right? Because we also don’t want to inadvertently accuse a U.S. citizen of not being [a citizen] and then they’re terrified and disenfranchised from that part of the process,” according to NPR.

Federal officials in the call said the agency was attempting to match voters’ names, dates of birth, addresses and phone numbers from Nevada’s publicly available voter file against USCIS records. Nicolas Bartell, an associate director with USCIS, said the agency was devoting “significant additional resources” to the project and that he had discussed “moving 40 additional staff to do nothing but this.”

Pennsylvania had a similar exchange with DHS after the July allegations, NPR confirmed. The state has not received a smaller, prioritized list of potential noncitizens from the federal government. According to NPR, an official familiar with the Pennsylvania meeting — who did not have permission to speak publicly — said it was clear DHS did not have confidence in the numbers it had stated publicly. The official added that should DHS provide credible proof, Pennsylvania would notify law enforcement and work to remove unlawful voters from the rolls.

In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised the department would release similar analyses during the general election early voting period and while votes are being counted. “We will pursue maximum pressure on this,” Mullin said at the time, before threatening to prosecute local election officials who did not adequately respond to information provided by DHS. “Those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties and, even depending on how far it goes, prison time.”

Nevada officials asked during the call whether the federal government was investigating any election officials in their state. The federal officials said they had made no criminal referrals against state election officials. Honey said she would put in a good word with the secretary. “We will absolutely report back to the secretary that you guys were just great,” she said, according to NPR. “And that you’re going to take this list and do your best with it. And so I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

DHS said it still had more than 14,000 Nevada voters that “need additional review,” according to NPR.

California, another state named in Trump’s July announcement, said DHS had not answered its questions about the allegations. “The real threat is that eligible voters — your friends, family, and neighbors — are recklessly and mistakenly removed from the voter rolls as a result of the administration’s fishing expedition for purported non-citizens,” a California statement to NPR read.

NPR said it reached out to DHS and USCIS for information on why the federal government touted numbers its own employees acknowledged were inflated. USCIS deferred to DHS, which did not comment.

With less than three months until Election Day, voting officials across the affected states said they remained wary of removing voters from the rolls without complete documentation.