DHS acknowledges the noncitizen numbers it touted on voter rolls were inflated

A voter casts a ballot at a vote center set up in a tent in Las Vegas on June 9. Jae C. Hong/AP hide caption

In a call with Nevada state election officials earlier this month, the Trump administration's point person on noncitizen voting insisted her team was working "in good faith."

"We are an open book here," said Heather Honey, an official at the Department of Homeland Security, who previously worked to push election falsehoods before her current post. "We are acting in very good faith. And we just want to help you."

But more than a month after President Trump touted in a primetime address that his administration had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls of Nevada and just three other states, those states are still asking for proof or even a complete list of the voters federal officials say should be investigated.

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In the Nevada call, federal officials did more to detail how they arrived at their numbers, but their statements also undermined the broader claim that American elections are rife with noncitizen voters.

DHS initially announced it had found close to 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada's voter list. But a DHS official acknowledged in the meeting with Nevada officials that number was "the ceiling" and each voter still had to be manually reviewed. Then, a day later, DHS provided the state with a list of 185 ID numbers pertaining to voters the agency said it was confident were noncitizens. NPR acquired records and a recording of the video call, first reported by The New York Times , via a public record request.

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Nevada asked for more information on that smaller group of 185 voters, and the data points used to match them to noncitizens. DHS declined to provide that. The agency did say it still had more than 14,000 Nevada voters that "need additional review."

NPR has confirmed that officials in Pennsylvania had a similar call with DHS after Trump's allegations in July, but the state has not received a smaller list of potential noncitizens from the federal government.

"It was clear that DHS did not have confidence that the numbers they have stated publicly were accurate," said an official with knowledge of the meeting in Pennsylvania, who did not have permission to speak publicly. Should DHS provide credible proof, the official said the state would notify law enforcement and work to remove unlawful voters from the voter list.

NPR reached out to both DHS and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of DHS, for information on why the federal government touted numbers its own employees acknowledged were inflated. USCIS deferred to DHS, which did not comment.

Less than three months until Election Day, voting officials are wary of removing voters from lists if they are not completely certain they are ineligible.

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"The integrity of the electoral process in our state is of supreme importance," said Mark Wlaschin, Nevada's deputy secretary of state for elections, in the call with DHS. "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."

California, another state mentioned in Trump's announcement, echoed that concern in a statement to NPR.

"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," the statement reads. The state said DHS has not provided a response to its questions about the allegations.

In the Nevada meeting, Nicolas Bartell, an associate director with USCIS, told the Nevada officials that USCIS is devoting "significant additional resources" toward the project of manually reviewing state voter rolls.

"I was having a discussion earlier this week about moving 40 additional staff to do nothing but this," Bartell said.

The federal officials explained they were attempting to match voters' names, dates of birth, addresses and phone numbers from Nevada's publicly available voter file with USCIS records to identify noncitizens.

In correspondence, federal officials declined a request from the state to provide the first name, middle name, last name, date of birth, address and any other data points that USCIS matched for the 185 registered voters identified as noncitizens.

"We'd prefer to limit our information sharing to just providing you the voter ID from your public voter list," responded USCIS official Kimberly Vogt. "The information in the NV public list is what we used to conduct our research so [it's] readily available to you but please let us know if there's an issue."

Nevada officials responded that they couldn't act on the information.

"We are unable to conduct an analysis without real verifiable information," Wlaschin wrote in an Aug. 20 email.

In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised that the department would be releasing similar analyses during the general election early voting period and while votes are being counted.

"We will pursue maximum pressure on this," Mullin said, 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 election officials asked about those comments during their call and whether the federal government was investigating any voting officials in the state.

The federal officials said they had not made any criminal referrals against state election officials.

Honey, who is leading this noncitizen voter project at DHS, said she would put in a good word with her boss.

"We will absolutely report back to the secretary that you guys were just great," Honey said. "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."

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