The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wrongly identified 185 people on Nevada’s voter rolls as non-citizens, state officials said this week, escalating concerns over the shoddy methodology the government is using to raise fear about non-citizen voting ahead of the midterm elections.
In July, Donald Trump gave a speech saying DHS had found a combined 278,000 non-citizens on the rolls in Nevada, California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Follow-up letters to each of those states weakened the claim, saying there only could be as many as 278,000 non-citizens on the rolls, including up to 15,903 in Nevada.
In August, DHS officials told staffers in the Nevada secretary of state’s office that they had reviewed the numbers and confirmed only 185 were non-citizens. DHS officials said they still needed to review more than 14,000 records.
But on Wednesday, Nevada election officials said they had reviewed the 185 records DHS sent them and confirmed they were US citizens. “As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens. You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise,” Greg Ott, a deputy attorney general, wrote to DHS this week in an email obtained by the Guardian through a public records request. The message was first reported by the New York Times and Nevada Independent.
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Likely working as intended, the difference being the holes in the systems are still being reported in this moment.
The idea is to have a “system with safeguards” but without any open source level transparency on those “safeguards”. Could be anything in that programming. Every 20th female vote isn’t counted. Or every 15th black vote is found fraudulent. Whatever. Recount? The system checks itself against the baseline programming.
“The list of 185 were simply a subset of individuals that had gone through a rigorous manual review process at that time of the call. The list shared with Nevada last month also included 6,218 individuals with the highest number of matching attributes to an alien in DHS records,” the spokesperson said.
So they’re flagging anyone who has “matching attributes” with an immigrant in DHS records. So anyone with the same name or whatever as a known immigrant is being flagged to be removed from the voter rolls? Did these 6,218 people also happen to share all their “attributes” with a US citizen perhaps? Expect to see thousands of citizens being dis-enrolled before the midterms, particularly in red states.
Thanks for the article. I hope enough people in the USA read this and many similar ones before they go voting. And take it for fact of course, don’t dismiss it as Brits meddling or so. Though of course US outlets also report on these things.
