The Trump administration’s latest voter-fraud crusade is running into an inconvenient problem: The evidence apparently isn’t there.
DHS launched an investigation into Nevada’s voter rolls, claiming that thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote. The administration initially put the number at a staggering 15,903, The New York Times reports.
There was just one little problem. That number didn’t hold up.
The list was eventually reduced to just 185 names. And according to Nevada election officials, even those 185 people appear to be U.S. citizens. So, now they're at zero noncitizen registered voters.
“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” Greg D. Ott, a deputy attorney general in Nevada, wrote in a letter sent to Department of Homeland Security officials. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”
Nevada officials have asked DHS for enough information to verify the identities of the people it claims are noncitizens. Instead, DHS provided voter case numbers that state officials say do not substantiate the administration’s allegations.
“Our records do not support DHS’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that,” Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said in a statement. “Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.”
In other words, the Trump administration arrived in Nevada waving around a massive voter-fraud number, to watch it shrink dramatically once state officials actually examined the records. And not just shrink. They didn't find one piece of evidence.
The episode is another example of the problem with announcing sweeping claims about election fraud before the underlying evidence has been independently verified. What began as nearly 16,000 alleged noncitizen voters has now apparently produced no confirmed noncitizen voters at all.
So much for the giant voter-fraud scandal. The numbers have a funny way of disappearing when someone actually checks them.
