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DHS Witch Hunt Falls Apart as It Can’t Name a Single Noncitizen Voter
Earlier this summer, the Trump administration claimed that there were more than 15,000 noncitizens voting on Nevada’s voter rolls. Last month, that number shrank to 185. Now it’s zero—a perfect example of the administration’s frantic, fraught effort to find voter fraud that doesn’t exist.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in July that he found 15,903 noncitizen voters on Nevada’s voter rolls. _The New York Times_ on Thursday reported that a follow-up meeting between DHS officials and Nevada election officers revealed that the number was wildly incorrect.
“So what you’re saying is the 15,000 number has not been vetted?” Nevada Secretary of State Chief Deputy C. Murphy Hebert asked in the August meeting.
“I probably wouldn’t use the sentence, ‘It hasn’t been vetted,’” Homeland Security Secretary Kimberley Vogt said. “Because definitely we’ve done something with it to get down to 15,000. So I wouldn’t say that. But it hasn’t had a full manual review of each one.” She also stated that they were not saying that only 185 people on the voter roll were noncitizens, but that those 185 definitely were. But that was wrong too.
“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” Nevada Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott wrote in a letter to DHS this week. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”
Nevada election operators say they are still waiting for the list of 15,903 noncitizens, which DHS has now lowered to 6,218. But even that number may be inaccurate due to DHS’s use of “voter case numbers.”
“The number also doesn’t tell us whether an individual was born in the United States, naturalized, derived citizenship through a parent, or holds any particular immigration status,” Nevada Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott wrote. “A number that matches a voter record thus establishes only that a number exists in, or once existed in, a voter registration system.”
These baseless claims—and their debunking—may very well be happening in other states in the Trump administration’s voter fraud witch hunt.
