LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Nearly a month after the federal government claimed there were at least 185 non-citizens on Nevada's voter rolls, the state still maintains it doesn't have enough information to verify the allegation.
The Department of Homeland Security sent state officials a spreadsheet with fields including a "voter case number," but that spreadsheet did not include names, addresses or dates of birth that could be used to identify individual voters.
But the federal government contends it's given Nevada enough information to investigate at least the 185 names, while the department examines thousands more people who may not be eligible to register to vote.
The controversy began in July, when President Donald Trump alleged there were hundreds of thousands of non-citizen voters on the rolls in the United States. The Department of Homeland Security followed up with letters to Nevada, Pennsylvania, California and New Jersey, noting the possibility of thousands of non-citizen registrants.
But the spreadsheet shared with Nevada had only a "voter case number," a "voter case state," whether the person was a citizen or not and whether the information had been confirmed. But names, addresses or other identifying information was not included.
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said officials asked the department for more information, but were rebuffed.
"We quickly realized that they weren't being serious about this process and again, it leads to the fact that they're just trying to create confusion and doubt within this process, and we can't accept that," he said.
WATCH | Are there non-citizens on Nevada's voter rolls?
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the 185 names had undergone "a rigorous manual review process," and that an additional 6,218 were still being reviewed, out of more than 15,000 suspected ineligible voters.
"DHS is assisting Nevada by narrowing their list of nearly 2.3 million registered voters to just 15,903 who match an alien in DHS records. DHS is providing a service to the state of Nevada," the statement said.
Channel 13 asked the department why names, addresses and other identifying information hadn't been provided to the state, but the department did not answer the question directly.
But the "voter case number" supposedly corresponds to the unique voter number issued to each registered voter in Nevada.
State officials, however, said numbers issued to Clark County voters have since been supplanted by new state-issued numbers, as part of the switch to a top-down voter registration system in Nevada. That makes tracking down voters by that number difficult, and is part of the reason the state asked for more information, officials say.
"We tried, but then we quickly realized it was an incomplete data set, and to use an incomplete data set to make conclusive decisions would be irresponsible for us," Aguilar said. "It's just sloppy work, it's lazy work, it's inaccurate and it's unacceptable because you're talking about a fundamental constitutional right, and the burden is really high when you're talking about somebody's constitutional right."
But the federal government is just as adamant in its position.
"DHS is laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens," the department spokesman wrote in the statement. "Homeland Security Investigations] is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found. We have repeatedly demonstrated that illegal aliens can and do vote in our elections. Under President Trump, HSI is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders."
But Aguilar said the state of Nevada is already taking on voter fraud, and has been for years.
"We're already ahead of it. We've been investigating voter fraud the entire time I've been in office," said Aguilar, who was first elected in 2022. "We built a full investigative team who has been working extremely hard. They are doing what they need to do to ensure our elections remain safe. They're [federal investigators] going to come in after the fact, and we've already done the work and we're holding people accountable for being bad actors. But it's not the large number they keep accusing our state of. It's minimal. There is no widespread fraud in our elections."
Pressed for numbers, Aguilar said, "it's in the single digits. ...Yes, it does occur, but it's in the single digits."
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