Nevada officials said this week that a Trump administration assertion that it confirmed finding 185 noncitizens in the state’s voter rolls was inaccurate.
“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” Greg D. Ott, chief deputy attorney general, told the Department of Homeland Security in a Wednesday email. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”
The department claimed over the summer that a review using immigration databases of Nevada’s voter rolls from July 2025 had come up with as many as 15,903 potential noncitizens.
In a virtual meeting with Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar’s office in August, DHS characterized the figure as a “ceiling,” saying that it had only confirmed 185 noncitizens after a manual investigation.
Another 6,218 Nevadans described as “higher confidence matches” required additional review, a federal official said.
Ott wrote that DHS had only provided Nevada 6,403 “voter case numbers” despite repeated requests for additional identifying information, such as full names, dates of birth, addresses and “other data points DHS matched for the 185 individuals identified in the spreadsheet.”
He said that Nevada officials had learned that the so-called voter case numbers were Nevada’s voter registration numbers, which are only an administrative identifier, adding that it’s not proof of a person’s identity or citizenship status.
Voter registration numbers in Nevada may belong to more than one person after the state transitioned to a single voter-registration system, Ott said. “As a result, the same number may appear at different points in time in connection with different voter records.”
Without additional information from DHS, he wrote, “the state will be unable to determine with confidence whether the individuals referenced by DHS are non-citizen voters.”
‘Service to the citizens of Nevada’
Ott was responding to a Sept. 9 message from the DHS Office of Intergovernmental Affairs that accused Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar’s office of mischaracterizing the federal agency’s findings.
“As described in the meeting, this number was arrived at through a review of matching criteria — the more attributes from the individual registered voter that match an individual in DHS immigration records, the higher the confidence level,” an unnamed DHS official wrote. “Each one of the 15,903 individuals identified should be carefully reviewed by your state to determine eligibility for voting in a federal election.”
The official said the federal government had offered to review every file as “a service to the citizens of Nevada.”
The Review-Journal obtained the messages through a records request.
DHS couldn’t be reached for comment after hours Thursday, but a representative disputed the findings in a statement to the New York Times.
“The list of 185 were simply a subset of individuals that had gone through a rigorous manual review process,” the statement said.
Aguilar provided his own statement.
“Our records do not support DHS’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that,” he said. “Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.”
Back and forth began in July
The sequence of events kicked off in July when President Donald Trump addressed the nation in a prime-time speech alleging widespread voter fraud.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin brought up the 15,903 figure for the first time in a letter to Aguilar that same day.
The virtual meeting took place the following month.
Earlier this month, DHS assigned hundreds of agents to nine states, including Nevada, to expand voter fraud investigations, according to CNN and the New York Times.
Also this month, the Department of Justice instructed Aguilar to preserve records related to the 2024 election while the federal government appeals a court ruling in a lawsuit that seeks the state’s unredacted voter registration database.
In the litigation-hold letter, DOJ official Eric Neff also informed the state’s chief elections officer that he was under investigation over the extent to which he had complied with federal records requests.
On Wednesday, Aguilar wrote letters to Nevada’s U.S. senators and House members asking them to deploy congressional observers to U.S. Postal Service locations “to help ensure smooth and uninterrupted election process” during Election Day.
Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com.
