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.
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. 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. "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.
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