Nevada confirms all 185 DHS-flagged non-citizens are US citizens

DHS provided only voter ID numbers, state officials say

Nevada election officials have confirmed that all 185 people the Department of Homeland Security identified as potential non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls are US citizens, according to an email Nevada Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott sent to the department this week that was obtained by the New York Times and Nevada Independent.

The state finding directly contradicts an August determination by DHS officials, who told staffers in the Nevada secretary of state’s office that they had reviewed the records and confirmed 185 were non-citizens. Nevada officials then conducted their own review of the records DHS sent them and reached the opposite conclusion.

“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens. You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise,” Ott wrote.

The dispute traces back to a July speech by Donald Trump, who said DHS had found a combined 278,000 non-citizens on voter rolls in Nevada, California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Follow-up letters DHS sent to each of those states softened the claim, saying there could be as many as 278,000 non-citizens on the rolls — including up to 15,903 in Nevada.

In his email, Ott criticized what he characterized as DHS’s lack of transparency about its methodology. When Nevada officials asked DHS for first names, last names, addresses, and any other data points the department had matched, Ott wrote, the department said it would provide only the voter identification number.

That number alone is insufficient, Ott said. Nevada’s voter registration numbers can correspond to multiple people, he wrote, because each of Nevada’s counties used to maintain its own registration system before the state transitioned to a single statewide system and assigned new voter identification numbers. “As a result, the same number may appear at different points in time in connection with different voter records,” Ott wrote.

Ott added that the registration number does not indicate how someone became a citizen. “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,” he wrote. “Election records commonly reflect the information supplied during registration. For example, if someone registered to vote in 1970, the registration record may be incomplete; the name, address, and date of birth may be incomplete, changed, entered differently, or shared by more than one person.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not return a request for comment.

A similar exchange has unfolded in Pennsylvania, where election officials have also pressed DHS for information about its methodology. Votebeat reported earlier this month that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt wrote in an August letter that DHS representatives had indicated they did not have “high confidence” in the figure of up to 14,576 non-citizens on Pennsylvania’s voter rolls.

In August, DHS officials told Nevada staff they still needed to review more than 14,000 records beyond the 185 already sent to the state. The Nevada finding and the parallel Pennsylvania dispute come ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections.