DHS Told Nevada It Has Only 185 Confirmed Noncitizen Voters, Not the 16,000 It Publicly Claimed

Since President Trump's primetime address touting more than 250,000 noncitizens found on voter rolls in Nevada, California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, the federal government's own numbers have collapsed under scrutiny.

On an Aug. 13 call with Nevada election officials, DHS disclosed it has confirmed only 185 "potential" noncitizens on the state's voter rolls, according to recordings obtained by Democracy Docket and confirmed by NPR through a public records request. That's a fraction of the nearly 16,000 DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed in a letter to Nevada officials earlier this summer.

DHS official Heather Honey told Nevada officials her team was acting "in good faith" and called the department "an open book." But on the same call, a DHS official admitted the 16,000 figure was only "the ceiling," meaning every one of those names still required manual review before anyone could call them confirmed noncitizens. More than 14,000 names remain in that unverified category, DHS said.

Nevada asked DHS for the underlying data used to flag even the smaller list of 185 voters. DHS said no. Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, didn't mince words in an interview with Democracy Docket, calling the effort "bullst" and saying DHS is "not sophisticated in their efforts to determine who is eligible to vote and who's not."

Pennsylvania had a similar call with DHS after Trump's July allegations. According to NPR, the state still hasn't received any refined list of potential noncitizens, despite DHS publicly claiming tens of thousands were on its rolls. An official familiar with that call, speaking without permission to go on record, told NPR it was "clear that DHS did not have confidence that the numbers they have stated publicly were accurate."

Where the number problem actually matters

Conservatives pushing for stronger voter ID and roll maintenance need to reckon with this: overselling a number you can't back up hands ammunition to people who want to dismiss the entire issue of noncitizen voting as fake.

DHS's own SAVE system data, cited in a White House document reported by Breitbart, shows 25 states ran roughly 68 million registration records and found just over 28,000 noncitizens who had illegally registered, alongside 400,000 deceased registrants. That's a real number from real system checks. It's far from 250,000 and covers a different process than the state-specific letters Noem sent out.

New Jersey is the case that actually produced hard numbers, and they don't help Trump's case. Gov. Mikie Sherrill's administration found a software error in the state's motor vehicle registration system improperly added 6,600 noncitizens to the voter list. A preliminary investigation found up to 400 of them may have cast ballots, according to FactCheck.org. Trump described this on July 22 as "thousands and thousands of votes," which FactCheck.org flagged as a clear overstatement of the state's own findings. Four hundred votes, spread across candidates and unaffiliated registrations, wouldn't have changed a single statewide result. Kamala Harris beat Trump in New Jersey by more than 252,000 votes in 2024.

The legitimate concern buried under the bad math

None of this means the underlying question is fake. The New Jersey software error is real and it did put thousands of ineligible names on the rolls, which is exactly the kind of administrative failure that voter-roll critics have warned about for years. The Heritage Foundation's election fraud database has documented just over 100 convicted cases of noncitizen voting or registration since 1982, according to FactCheck.org. Actual prosecuted fraud is rare, but that doesn't account for how many ineligible registrations sit on rolls undetected because no one is systematically checking.

Daily Wire's reporting adds a real wrinkle here. California's Secretary of State's Office told the American Center for Law and Justice, per its public records request, that the state's registration system doesn't track cancellations by noncitizenship as a specific category. The California Department of Justice reportedly has no written policy for handling referrals of suspected illegal voting. Those are legitimate, verifiable gaps in state-level tracking, not partisan spin. A state's inability to say how many noncitizen registrations it has caught and removed is a transparency problem worth fixing regardless of what DHS's inflated number turns out to be.

What's unresolved

DHS has not explained publicly why it touted 250,000-plus and 16,000-in-Nevada figures its own staff acknowledged were unverified ceilings, not confirmed counts. NPR reports DHS declined to comment when asked directly. Noem's letters to California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania made claims about noncitizen totals in those states that, per the Nevada disclosure, may face the same walk-back once state officials push for underlying data. None of those three states has yet received a refined list either.

The SAVE America Act, which would require photo ID and proof of citizenship for federal voter registration, remains stalled in the Senate. Whether DHS ever produces verifiable proof behind its Nevada, California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey claims will likely determine whether that bill gets new momentum or dies as an example of a real problem oversold with fake precision.