Both President Trump and the Department of Homeland Security claimed on Thursday that they had uncovered a significant number of noncitizens registered in four states, but offered no evidence to support their findings nor any description of their investigative process.
Election officials in at least one state — Nevada — immediately rebuffed the claims regarding noncitizens on their voter rolls.
Evidence-free claims that noncitizens have voted in elections have been core to the president’s political message — and central to his justification to enact the SAVE America Act, federal voting legislation that Democrats claim is aimed at tipping the scales to benefit Republicans.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump escalated those claims, stating that the Department of Homeland Security had found “approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” His statement appears to be based on a document released by The White House on Thursday from the Department of Homeland Security that claims to have found more than 250,000 noncitizens registered in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
The document offered no other details of how it arrived at such a large number, and added that those four states do not use the SAVE system, a resource administered by the Department of Homeland Security to verify citizenship status. With those four states not using the program, it is unclear how the Department of Homeland Security produced its count from public voter files.
Data from the Nevada secretary of state’s office produced on Thursday showed that out of its 2.1 million active voters, only 3,912 active voters did not have a Social Security number, but didn’t rule out the possibility that those votes might have a passport, birth certificate or other document proving their citizenship.
The D.H.S. document also said that all four states “have been notified of this serious threat to national security.” Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic secretary of state in Nevada, said he had received no notifications from D.H.S. on the issue recently.
Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of the commonwealth in Pennsylvania, explained in a statement the numerous, rigorous steps voters must take to verify their identities before they can cast a ballot.
“Pennsylvania follows all state and federal laws when it comes to our elections, and our voter rolls are properly maintained and updated,” Mr. Schmidt said. He added: “All evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania. While the Department has made clear that we cannot share Pennsylvanians’ private, personal information, we welcome D.H.S. sharing their methodology and list of potential ineligible voters so we can carefully review the validity of their claims.”
Spokeswomen for the California and New Jersey secretaries of state did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In the past, Republican state officials eager to claim that noncitizen voters are prevalent in elections have repeatedly put out inflated numbers, only to later revise those numbers sharply downward.
The SAVE system has also mistakenly flagged U.S. citizens as noncitizens in several states that use it to examine voter rolls.
For example, Iowa revised an initial estimate of more than 2,100 potential noncitizens on its voter rolls to 277 after further review. Of those cases, 35 noncitizens cast ballots that were counted in the 2024 general election out of more than 1.6 million ballots across the state.
The Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, recently noted that often “claims of large numbers of possible noncitizens on voter records are revised significantly downward after proper investigation and scrutiny.”
D.H.S.’s most recent analysis appears to be falling into an especially problematic trap: using publicly-available state voter records that are scrubbed for privacy reasons of important identifying information, including driver’s license numbers. The invalidity of such analyses — and the tendency to inflate numbers — is well-known. In fact, the administration has used that argument in its ongoing initiative to try to force Democratically-led states to give them their unredacted voter records. The states have opposed such efforts on the grounds of protecting the privacy of voters and complying with state laws.
In a court filing submitted in the U.S. Court of Appeals in April in one such case in against California, DOJ attorneys explained that the purpose of their request for driver’s license numbers was to “distinguish duplicate names that are not otherwise easily identifiable.”