DHS Says Texas Has 111,573 Dead People and 2,296 Noncitizens on Voter Rolls

What DHS found

A Department of Homeland Security report says more than 113,000 people who are either dead or in the country illegally are currently registered to vote in Texas, according to the Daily Signal. The document breaks that down as 111,573 deceased individuals and 2,296 noncitizens on the state's voter rolls.

DHS says the numbers come from a review of voter roll data from 10 states that agreed to share their full rolls with the federal government: Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. Across all 10, DHS reports more than 400,000 deceased people and more than 28,000 noncitizens registered to vote, per the Daily Signal's account of the declassified document.

The other 40 states have not turned over complete voter rolls to DHS. But the department says a preliminary look at California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania found more than 250,000 illegal aliens registered to vote in those four states combined, according to the report cited by the Daily Signal.

DHS presses holdout states

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem sent letters to the secretaries of state in those four states: California's Shirley Weber, New Jersey's Dale Caldwell, Nevada's Francisco Aguilar, and Pennsylvania's Al Schmidt. Noem asked each of them to respond within two weeks confirming they'll cooperate with DHS's review, framing it as necessary for "free, fair, and honest elections."

None of the four states has publicly responded as of this writing, and no independent audit of DHS's methodology has been made public. A registration record showing a "noncitizen" or "deceased" flag is not automatically proof of fraudulent voting. States regularly carry stale records because voters die, move, or become naturalized citizens, and list maintenance lags behind. DHS's report identifies registrations, not confirmed illegal votes cast, and the Daily Signal's write-up does not claim otherwise.

Critics of aggressive voter-roll purges have long raised the concern that a bloated registration list is a real administrative problem, but conflating it with proven voter fraud overstates what the data shows. DHS has not announced criminal charges tied to these registrations, and no prosecutions were cited in the report.

Texas reporting over 111,000 dead people still on the rolls suggests a significant list maintenance issue. States are required under federal law to keep voter rolls reasonably current, and this data, if accurate, points to a maintenance failure on a large scale in at least one state.

The SAVE Act logjam

All of this lands while the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE Act, remains stalled in Congress. The bill would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote federally.

President Trump held a press conference urging Americans to call their representatives and demand passage. "To all Americans: I ask you to pick up your phone tomorrow, call your representatives in the House and Senate and demand that they pass the SAVE America Act without delay," Trump said, according to the Daily Signal. He added, "How easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat? The only reason you would not do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad."

That represents Trump's characterization, not a proven claim backed by evidence in this report. Opponents of the SAVE Act, including many Democratic lawmakers and voting-rights groups, have argued documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements risk disenfranchising eligible voters, particularly married women whose legal names don't match their birth certificates, and low-income voters who lack easy access to passports or birth certificates. Supporters counter that a handful of documented exceptions can be built into implementation and that citizenship verification is standard practice for a host of other government functions.

Legal roadblocks

DHS says some states have signed memoranda of agreement to use the federal SAVE system, an existing USCIS database, to check voter rolls. But U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan has blocked the administration from using a revamped version of that immigration database, according to the Daily Signal, which did not detail the full legal reasoning behind the injunction.

That ruling leaves DHS's roll-matching effort in a legal gray zone even as the department pushes holdout states to comply voluntarily.

What's unresolved

Forty states still haven't handed over complete voter rolls to DHS, meaning the national picture remains incomplete. Whether California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania comply with Noem's two-week deadline, and whether any of the flagged registrations translate into actual fraudulent votes cast rather than outdated paperwork, are both open questions with no public answers yet. The SAVE Act's fate in Congress, and the outcome of Judge Sooknanan's injunction on appeal, will determine whether DHS's roll-matching push has any teeth going forward.