Trump admin quietly walks back claim of 16K noncitizens voting in Nevada

Federal officials have been unable to back up their allegations that nearly 16,000 noncitizens could be registered to vote in Nevada, telling the Nevada Secretary of State's Office in a private call that they were still reviewing thousands of names on the list after President Donald Trump (R) made sweeping allegations last month about noncitizens voting.

Email records and a recording of an Aug. 13 meeting between the secretary of state's office and representatives from the Department of Homeland Security obtained via a public records request indicate that federal officials have only been able to identify 185 potential noncitizen voters so far, and the 15,903 number they originally gave was a "ceiling."

"The 15,000 would have been the preliminary," Kimberley Vogt, the fraud division chief in the fraud detection and national security directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said during the meeting. "And then the manual review once we are done and confirm that we have a high degree of confidence … that would be what we would send."

The secretary of state's office received the data from federal officials but is not sharing it while it is under review.

In follow-up emails, Vogt said officials did not reduce the nearly 16,000 estimate to 185 and still have more than 14,000 under review. She noted that 6,200 are pending final review. 

She added that information sharing between federal officials and state officials is limited to providing the voter ID from the state's public voter list. State officials replied that they are "unable to conduct an analysis without real verifiable information."

Email records show communications between the Nevada Secretary of State's Office and the federal government are ongoing. 

Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D) wrote in a Thursday statement that his office and local government officials are committed to ensuring voter rolls are accurate and protecting the rights of eligible voters.

"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," he said.