The Department of Homeland Security is releasing more data behind President Trump’s claims of voter rolls littered with noncitizens, saying its own review found more than 190,000 suspect names in California and 35,000 in New Jersey.
DHS said it also identified nearly 16,000 names in Nevada and almost 15,000 in Pennsylvania that its review flagged as possible noncitizens.
Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent letters to the secretaries of state in each of them, giving them a two-week deadline to work with him on plans to cleanse their lists.
“Election security is national security,” he said Friday. “Only Americans should be electing American leaders.”
Mr. Mullin was putting meat on the bones of Mr. Trump’s primetime speech Thursday, when he revealed the broad outlines of DHS’ new estimates.
The department said it identified the potential noncitizens through a review of the four states’ public voter lists.
Some 25 other states have worked with DHS, running their own voter lists through a department system for verifying citizenship and legal status. DHS says those 25 states have identified 28,000 potential noncitizens on their rolls, as well as more than 400,000 names of dead people.
Texas ran its file and identified 2,296 noncitizens out of more than 18 million registered voters, or 1 in every 10,000.
If that same rate applied to California, it would mean the state would have about 2,800 noncitizens on its rolls — far fewer than the 190,832 that DHS said it found in its “preliminary reviews.”
The exact number was 35,152 for New Jersey, 15,903 for Nevada 15,903 and 14,576 for Pennsylvania.
In the letter to Nevada, Mr. Mullin said DHS specifically identified 8,576 people whose names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers matched noncitizens listed in the federal department’s own files.
The letter didn’t say what caused the other 7,000 names to be flagged.
Being on the voter rolls doesn’t automatically mean someone has cast a ballot in a federal election, and proven cases of illegal voting by noncitizens are quite rare, averaging in the low double digits a year.
Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, called DHS’ numbers “wildly speculative at best.”
“We’ve proven time and time again that Nevada runs some of the safest, most secure and accessible elections in the country,” he said.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, said his state asks voters to give some identification to register and that noncitizen voting was “extremely rare.” But he said he was open to looking at DHS’ work to “evaluate the validity of these claims.”
Nearly all states rely on voters to self-attest to their citizenship, under penalty of perjury. The states generally don’t seek any further evidence.
The advent of Motor Voter, the 1993 federal law that required state offices such as motor vehicle bureaus to prod customers to register to vote, has made the situation messier.
A glitch in Pennsylvania’s system, for example, prodded noncitizens to register to vote even after they told the computer they weren’t citizens. The glitch lasted more than 20 years, until a 2017 fix.
State officials in 2018 sent letters to nearly 8,000 registered voters asking them to clarify if they were eligible.
California has downplayed the notion of noncitizens on its voter rolls.
When The Times sought records of noncitizen voters in 2024, the California secretary of state’s office reported that it didn’t “have any data to report on instances of noncitizens voting or being incorrectly registered and removed from the voting rolls.”
Local jurisdictions, though, have acknowledged the issue.
Orange County last year notified the federal government it removed 17 people from its voter rolls after realizing they weren’t citizens. The county said it investigated after receiving complaints from noncitizens that they received ballots in the mail under California’s all-mail election system.
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