DHS's 250,000 Noncitizen Voter Claim Doesn't Match Its Own Letters to States

The number keeps shrinking under scrutiny

Since President Trump's primetime address this month warning of over 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls of California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has repeated that figure publicly at least twice. But the paper trail DHS itself sent to those states tells a different story.

Letters obtained by The Hill show DHS's own "preliminary review" found roughly 118,000 matches, less than half the number Trump and Noem have cited. In Pennsylvania specifically, Noem's letter says there "may be as many as 14,576 non-citizens" on the rolls, but only 8,594 actually came up as matches against DHS's own files, according to CNN. The letter itself calls the figure unverified and asks Pennsylvania to help DHS confirm identities.

That's a meaningful gap between what Noem says at podiums and what DHS puts in writing to the states it's investigating.

Nobody will explain the math

Neither the White House nor DHS has detailed how it arrived at the 250,000 figure, according to The Hill. A White House official told reporters the estimate came from an analysis of commercial databases, CBS News reported.

Commercial data matching is notoriously prone to false positives. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told CBS News the method "is likely to lead to false positives, significantly overestimating the number of potential noncitizens on voter rolls." He went further: "I guarantee you, that data includes a ton of people, maybe even a majority of people, who are absolutely eligible voters, and states would probably be breaking the law if they remove those voters from the rolls."

Becker's group has tracked this pattern before. When noncitizen-voting allegations get scrutinized, the group has found they typically stem from "misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data," and the numbers shrink once anyone checks. Confirmed instances of noncitizens actually casting ballots remain, by the group's account, exceedingly rare.

Matching a name, birthdate and partial Social Security number across databases built for different purposes will inevitably catch clerical errors, shared identifiers, and people who were noncitizens when a record was created but have since naturalized. Whether that concern fully explains the entire gap between 250,000 and 118,000, nobody outside DHS can say, because DHS hasn't shown its work.

The states say they haven't handed over anything to check

California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania have all refused to turn over their voter rolls to the federal government, and are in active litigation over it.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber wrote directly to Noem, telling her, "I have serious doubts about the reliability of your data and accuracy of your claims, since my office has not shared our statewide voter registration list with DHS or any other federal agency or official," according to a letter obtained by The Hill. She noted state law bars sharing voters' Social Security numbers with the federal government, and said DHS's letter "provides no detail whatsoever that my office can use to evaluate the veracity of your allegations."

If DHS never got California's voter file, the obvious question is what exact dataset it actually cross-referenced to produce any number for California at all. DHS hasn't answered that.

Courts have sided with the states, repeatedly

According to CNN, states challenging federal demands for voter roll data have won 16 out of 16 lawsuits so far. A separate judge ruled the DHS program underlying these audits is illegal, CNN reported.

New Hampshire's Republican secretary of state, David Scanlan, whose state got a DOJ lawsuit over the data dismissed, told CNN he isn't rattled by Noem's threats of fines or prosecution for noncompliance: "I'm not intimidated by that at all." Washington's Democratic secretary of state, Steve Hobbs, was blunter, calling the pressure campaign "a temper tantrum disguised as an official letter because they have hit roadblocks," per CNN.

Notably, pushback isn't confined to Democrats. Idaho's Republican attorney general's office sent DOJ a sharp letter of its own objecting to the department's insinuations of criminal conduct, CNN reported, undercutting any read of this fight as simply partisan trench warfare.

What's actually unresolved

The underlying question, whether meaningful numbers of noncitizens are registered and voting in these four states, remains genuinely unsettled. Weber's team hasn't independently audited its rolls against DHS's claims because it hasn't seen DHS's data. DHS hasn't released its methodology. No court has yet ruled on the merits of whether the disputed figures are accurate.

Noem has floated fines, penalties and even prison time for state election officials who don't cooperate with DHS reviews, according to CNN. No such prosecutions have been announced. Whether DHS ever publishes a verified, methodologically transparent number, or whether this settles into another executive order blocked in court, is the open question heading into the midterms.