A Department of Homeland Security fact sheet says that "over 250,000 noncitizens are illegally registered to vote" in California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania [1]. The letters the department actually sent those four states, under Secretary Markwayne Mullin, describe 118,003 records, combined [1].
Both numbers came from the same agency in the same push. The public one is more than twice the size of the private one, and the smaller figure is the one DHS put in writing to the officials who would have to act on it.
Start with what is legitimate here, because something is. Keeping voter rolls accurate is a federal obligation, not an optional courtesy, and the National Voter Registration Act requires that any state program to maintain an accurate roll "shall be uniform, nondiscriminatory, and in compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965" [2]. A noncitizen on a voter roll is a real problem. A secretary of state who receives a federal list of suspected matches has an obvious reason to open it, and would be criticized for ignoring it. If DHS has identified people who are registered and ineligible, saying so is the agency doing its job.
The problem is not that DHS looked. The problem is what the department says it looked at.
The letters say DHS analyzed publicly available voter rolls in the four states [1]. The 118,003 figure is described differently: those are records that matched a noncitizen in DHS files on name, date of birth, address and Social Security number [1]. Public voter rolls do not contain Social Security numbers. The two descriptions cannot both be complete accounts of the same analysis.
There is a documented place the department could have obtained that field. DHS procurement records show a contract with Thomson Reuters for voter-fraud identification work covering its "CLEAR product and other datasets," a commercial broker holding extensive personal data on Americans [1]. There is also a documented place it did not obtain it. The Justice Department sued all four of these states, plus more than two dozen others, to get voter rolls that include partial Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers [1]. Federal judges dismissed those suits in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and 15 other states. Only the Nevada case is still alive [1].
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber put the contradiction in one sentence: "I have serious doubts about the reliability of your data and accuracy of your claims, since my office has not shared our statewide voter registration list with DHS or any other federal agency or official" [1].
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar was blunter about the lawsuit: "You're suing me because I wouldn't give you that data, that information" [1]. He wants to know where the department got it, how it got it, and whether it is reliable [1]. Aguilar says DHS has not given Nevada the actual names it flagged [1].
David Becker, quoted by NPR, described the mechanical problem with an exercise like this: "There's no credible way to do this without creating an ungodly number of false positives" [1]. Names repeat. Dates of birth repeat. Matching two databases built for unrelated purposes produces collisions at scale, which is why serious matching programs publish their error rates alongside their hit counts. DHS did not respond to NPR's questions about its methodology [1]. The letters themselves call the work a "preliminary review" [1]. That phrase is doing a great deal of work, because a preliminary review of matches is not a count of noncitizens, and the fact sheet reported it as one.
There is a deadline underneath all of this. The National Voter Registration Act is explicit: "A State shall complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters" [2]. Ninety days before the November 3 general election is August 5. Nevada and California have both noted the date [1].
Be precise about what that provision does. It bars systematic removal programs inside the window. It does not freeze the rolls. Individual removals remain available on the grounds the statute specifies, and the change-of-residence procedure stays open on its own terms: a state cannot drop a registrant for moving unless the voter confirms the move in writing, or fails to answer a notice and then sits out two consecutive federal general elections [2]. What the 90-day rule shuts off is precisely the thing a federal list of 118,003 names invites, which is a batch.
That is the shape of the week. A public number above 250,000. A working number of 118,003 that the department itself calls preliminary. A matching method that cannot be what the letters describe. Four secretaries of state who have not been shown the names. A quiet period that starts August 5.
