Trump’s Claims Of Widespread Noncitizen Voting Dealt Major Blow After Bombshell Report

Claims of widespread voting by noncitizens by President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin took a major hit Thursday after Nevada officials could not identify a single noncitizen on a list DHS sent them.

The rebuke of the Trump administration came in a bombshell report from The New York Times, in which Nevada election officials said all 185 names DHS claimed were noncitizens were, in fact, U.S. citizens.

The claims in Nevada are part of broader accusations of widespread voting by noncitizens. Both Mullin and Trump have previously claimed the administration had identified 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Mullin said in July that 15,903 people in Nevada alone were noncitizens registered to vote.

DHS told Nevada officials it reviewed some of the nearly 16,000 names and “confirmed 185 are not U.S. Citizens,” according to the Times report.

“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” Greg D. Ott, a deputy attorney general in Nevada, wrote, according to a copy of a letter sent to Department of Homeland Security officials that The New York Times obtained. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”

Ott also said DHS has yet to provide election officials with that list of 15,903 alleged noncitizens, nor has it provided enough data to properly investigate the claims.

“Our records do not support DHS’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that,” Francisco Aguilar, the Democratic secretary of state in Nevada, said in a statement to the Times. “Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.”

DHS, in a statement to the Times, branded Nevada officials’ characterization as “false” and said the 185 names were “simply a subset of individuals that had gone through a rigorous manual review process”

During a virtual meeting with Nevada elections officials last month, Homeland Security official Kimberley Vogt admitted the department had not completed a full review of the original list of 15,903 names.

A follow-up email DHS sent to Nevada officials sought to clarify that the department had not whittled down the original 15,903 names to 185, according to the Times report.