Trump officials’ claim of 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls leaves states searching for answers

The useful part

Two weeks after Trump officials said they had found more than 250,000 non-U.S. Multiple state officials told NPR they fear these unverified numbers, or similar ones unveiled closer to the general election, could be used as a pretext for warrants to allow law enforcement to interfere in vote-counting. Several reviews in recent years have found that actual voting by noncitizens is extremely rare.

How it works

• The agency has not explained its methodology or provided the states with clarity on how it came to its conclusions.
• "These numbers, until they're backed up by any kind of clear, transparent methodology, should be considered made up," said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
• At least three of the four states' top election officials wrote back to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, raising questions about the accuracy of the numbers and demanding answers on how DHS did...
• Yet Mullin's letters to the states indicate his agency somehow obtained some of that sensitive data anyway.
• Nevada's voter rolls with voters' personal data is still pending, while federal judges have so far dismissed the suits in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and 15 other states.

What to take from it

"There's no credible way to do this without creating an ungodly number of false positives," he said. "You're suing me because I wouldn't give you that data, that information. Security, which oversaw the voter roll analysis of four states — California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — asked the states to respond to its allegations by Thursday.

Example or evidence

• Is it reliable?" asked Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, in an interview with NPR.
• Previous reviews and data-matching efforts on voter rolls that lack a unique identifier like a Social Security number have been notoriously error-prone, Becker noted.
• efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls frequently begin with inflated preliminary numbers that shrink down dramatically once investigations determine that many of the suspected noncitizens have...
• Aguilar noted that DHS has not provided him with the names of the Nevada registered voters the agency claims may be noncitizens.

Details worth keeping

citizens are on the voter rolls in just four states. Those lawsuits have so far been unsuccessful. Public voter rolls don't include Social Security numbers, and the letters say the agency found around 118,000 voters combined in those states whose "name, date of birth, address and Social Security number match a non-citizen in our files" — raising questions about how DHS obtained voters' Social Security numbers.

Related coverage

• Washingtonpost: President Donald Trump on Tuesday repeated his long-standing falsehoods about a rigged 2020 election.
• Npr: A Trump-aligned think tank has ties to a highly unusual Census Bureau report that the president is using to renew false claims of widespread voting by non-U.S. citizens in 2020, NPR has learned.
• Nymag: For Trump, noncitizen voting is the death of America. For many liberals, it is "Woke 1" excess. Why is some form of noncitizen voting so scary?
• Npr: A Trump-aligned think tank has ties to a highly unusual Census Bureau report that the president is using to renew false claims of widespread voting by non-U.S. citizens in 2020, NPR has learned.