DHS confirms only 185 non-citizens on Nevada voter rolls, far below earlier claim of 16,000
A month after suggesting Nevada's voter rolls could include as many as 16,000 non-citizens, the Department of Homeland Security has confirmed through manual review that only 185 are actually non-citizens, according to records obtained by the Guardian. More than 14,000 names still await further review.
On 16 July, President Donald Trump used a primetime television address to claim that a DHS review had identified roughly 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote across four states. In follow-up letters to Nevada, California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, DHS walked back the framing, describing the figures as a ceiling of potential non-citizen registrations rather than confirmed cases.
In its letter to Nevada, DHS said as many as 15,903 non-citizens might be registered in the state. DHS officials met with Nevada election officials last week for the first time to discuss the claim. DHS official Kimberley Vogt told Nevada officials that manual review had confirmed 185 of the flagged individuals were indeed non-citizens, while more than 14,000 still required additional review.
DHS also sent Nevada a separate list of 6,218 people who had not yet been manually reviewed but were flagged as "higher confidence matches" for possible non-citizen status, citing the state's approaching deadline to mail out ballots.
Nevada secretary of state Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, said his office would not risk disenfranchising eligible voters without the highest confidence in their ineligibility, noting the numbers shared publicly were preliminary. A DHS spokesperson confirmed that only 185 people had gone through full manual review and been confirmed as non-citizens.
At a 14 August meeting, Nevada elections director Mark Wlaschin and other state officials pressed DHS to explain its methodology. Officials said they had compared Nevada's public voter rolls from July 2025 against internal US Citizenship and Immigration Services data. Heather Honey, a DHS official known for contested research into voter records, took part in the call.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the episode shows a pattern of the administration making sweeping claims about non-citizen voting without disclosing methodology, with figures shrinking dramatically once states demand evidence. DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin had earlier threatened election officials with fines and prison time over compliance with voter-removal efforts, though DHS officials said no criminal referrals had been made against Nevada officials.
