Trump officials touted a voter fraud bombshell. Their data hasn’t proved it

By Gabe Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stood before the cameras last month and announced what he cast as a bombshell.

“We’ve identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in just four states,” Mullin told reporters.

The Department of Homeland Security said it reached that figure by comparing public voter rolls in Nevada, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California with federal immigration records. Mullin presented the results as hard evidence supporting President Donald Trump’s long-running, unsubstantiated claims of widespread noncitizen voting.

“One thing that I love about numbers, and I love about facts, is they don’t lie,” Mullin said.

But in Nevada, the numbers thus far do not show what DHS publicly claimed they do.

In July, the department said it had identified 15,903 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter rolls. However, in a meeting with state election officials last week, DHS acknowledged that it had fully reviewed only a fraction of those cases.

A recording of the August 13 meeting, plus more than a dozen emails reviewed by CNN, show that DHS officials have “confirmed” just 185 Nevada registrants as noncitizens through manual review. More than 14,000 cases remained unresolved, DHS said, including 6,200 the department labeled “higher confidence matches.”

But even those higher confidence matches were not definitive. In the meeting, DHS acknowledged that some, for example, could be naturalized citizens whose immigration records had not been updated.

The full list of 15,903 names was merely a “preliminary” finding, officials conceded.

During a key moment from the meeting, C. Murphy Hebert, the chief deputy in the Nevada secretary of state’s office, asked: “So what you’re saying is the 15,000 number has not been vetted?”

“I probably wouldn’t use the sentence, ‘It hasn’t been vetted,’” replied Kimberley Vogt, who leads a fraud division at DHS. “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.”

“That would be the ceiling,” Vogt said. “So it should not magically go above that. It would stay where it would stay, and it would go down from there as we make our way through it.”

In response to a list of specific questions from CNN, a DHS spokesperson disputed that the Nevada correspondence undercut its findings, but did not address the other questions.

Data undercuts broader claims of fraud

The private acknowledgments contrast sharply with the administration’s public rhetoric and raise further questions about the accuracy of the data the Trump administration has released in recent weeks purporting to show evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Earlier this week, the Census Bureau released an analysis claiming that 24,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 election. Trump quickly promoted it as further proof the election was stolen. But former senior Census Bureau officials raised significant issues with the report, criticizing its methodology, lack of transparency and potential political bias.

It is part of the administration’s escalating push to tighten voting rules, relitigate past elections and reinforce Trump’s longstanding claims about vulnerabilities in the electoral system. For months, Trump has been pressing congressional Republicans to pass the stalled SAVE America Act, which would require identification at the polls and proof of citizenship to register.

Democrats and voting-rights advocates warn the broader campaign is designed to tilt the scale for Republicans — and sow doubt in the midterm election results.

In Nevada, the vast majority of the 15,903 names remain unreviewed — in part because checking them individually “is a lot of work to go one by one,” Vogt, the DHS official, said in the August 13 meeting.

DHS declined to send Nevada the entire list of 15,903 cases, saying it wanted to avoid sending inaccurate records.

“We’re going to manually review to be sure that it is not someone’s dad or someone’s son – that it is that person,” Vogt said in the August 13 meeting. “Then we’re reducing the list down to what is a confirmed match.”

Election officials and voting-rights organizations have warned from the start that DHS’ data-matching could produce large numbers of false matches. Federal citizenship records can be outdated, and public voter files can lack enough personal information to reliably distinguish between people with similar names.

The full accuracy of DHS’ findings remains untested. The department has sent Nevada voter ID numbers for the 6,200 “higher confidence matches,” asking state officials to investigate and remove anyone found to be ineligible. But Nevada election officials told CNN that as of now, DHS has provided too little information to verify the matches — especially before the midterms.

“Weeks after the President held a national, primetime speech making sweeping claims regarding noncitizens and the security of our elections, DHS representatives informed our office that the numbers that were provided to the public are preliminary and that there is not high enough confidence to be able to share the full dataset with Nevada officials,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said in a statement. “The Secretary of State’s Office will not risk disenfranchising eligible voters and ripping away their Constitutional right to vote without the highest confidence of their ineligibility.”

DHS ‘election integrity’ unit

At the center of the DHS effort is Heather Honey, a Trump-aligned election researcher whose 2020 audit work has been promoted by the president and his allies as evidence that the election was stolen. DHS hired her last year to lead its “election integrity” campaign and promoted her in June to senior counselor to the secretary.

In the meeting with Nevada officials, Honey repeatedly described DHS as a cooperative partner.

“We are an open book here,” she said. “We’re acting in very good faith, and we just want to help you.”

Honey encouraged Nevada to investigate the names and remove any ineligible voters before the midterms. If the state could expedite its review of the cases, she said, the department could send a list of matches that are “75% confidence.”

Her conciliatory tone stood out in an administration that has relied far more on threats and legal pressure. DHS has begun withholding homeland security grants from states that reject Trump-backed election measures. The Justice Department has sued 30 states for their unredacted voter rolls, though federal courts have repeatedly blocked those efforts. And the administration has threatened election officials with fines or jail if they fail to adequately secure the November midterms.

That pressure hung over the meeting. Nevada leaders asked whether election officials in their state were under investigation. Honey sought to reassure them, saying DHS lacked the authority to prosecute election officials and had made no criminal referrals against them.

“We will absolutely report back to the Secretary that you guys were great and that you’re going to take this list and do your best with it,” she said. “So I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

The-CNN-Wire
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