Politics
DHS Investigated 185 Suspected Foreign Voters and Found 185 Americans
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
The Department of Homeland Security sent the state of Nevada a list of 185 people it suspected of being non-citizens on the voter rolls. Nevada checked. All 185 were American citizens. The investigation is being called complete.
This comes three months after President Trump announced in a July speech that DHS had uncovered a combined 278,000 non-citizen voters across Nevada, California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, a figure he described as a threat to the integrity of American democracy. The follow-up letter to Nevada quietly revised that number to "as many as 15,903," a phrase that in English means "we are not saying there are 15,903, we are saying there could be up to 15,903, assuming some number greater than zero exists, which we have not confirmed."
The confirmed number, following the state's review, is zero.
A spokesperson for the administration declined to characterize the outcome as a setback, telling reporters that "the process of verification is itself a form of election security," which is one way to describe asking a state to spend its resources confirming that its own citizens are citizens.
Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said his office reviewed each of the 185 records and found no discrepancies, a sentence that is doing considerable work given that the discrepancy it is not finding is the entire premise of the federal program.
The methodology DHS used to generate the list has not been made public. What is known is that it cross-referenced voter registration data with a federal database of non-citizens, a process that apparently cannot distinguish between a person who was once a non-citizen and registered later, a person whose name appears in both databases for administrative reasons, and a person who is simply an American whose name the computer also found somewhere else. These are, technically, different situations.
Trump has returned to the non-citizen voting claim repeatedly in recent weeks, calling it "the real threat" to the upcoming midterms. At a rally in Michigan last month he told the crowd that "they're letting them vote, they're letting millions of them vote," then pivoted to a story about a man he met in Ohio whose cousin had been cheated out of a parking spot, the connection between which was left as an exercise for the audience.
The three other states that received similar letters from DHS, California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, have not yet completed their reviews. Based on available data, there is every reason to expect those results will add to the total number of Americans DHS has formally accused of being foreign.
Nevada has certified its portion of the investigation closed. The 185 citizens on the list have been notified of nothing, because nothing happened to them, because they are citizens, which is what Nevada said before it checked and also after.
The DHS list cost the state time it did not have before an election. The election is in November. The list was wrong in November's direction.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/24/dhs-nevada-voter-non-citizens-error