The two weeks DHS gave four states to answer for more than 250,000 alleged noncitizen registrations ran out on Friday. California's answer, from Secretary of State Shirley Weber, was not a voter file or a data-sharing agreement. It was a challenge to whether the department's numbers could exist at all [1].
Weber put it 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]. Read the second clause twice, because it is the load-bearing one. A match list requires two lists. DHS claims to have found noncitizens on California's voter roll, and California's chief election officer says the state never handed that roll over. Either the department obtained the file some other way, and has not said how or how current its copy is, or its California number rests on something other than California's registration list. Sixteen days after the letters went out, DHS has not said which.
This is the third piece in this series, and the pattern has not moved since the first. When DHS announced more than 250,000 noncitizens registered across California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania, the only two state-level figures it put in writing, 14,576 for Pennsylvania and roughly 15,903 for Nevada, totaled 30,479. The department's own stricter four-field matching cut its own total to 118,003. Pennsylvania's Republican secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, said the underlying list had never been sent to his state at all. Those numbers come from the first two pieces in this series, and nothing that happened this week changed any of them. The deadline that just expired was DHS's, imposed on the states. The questions still open are the states', addressed to DHS, and those carry no deadline at all.
Now the calendar does what the letters could not. The National Voter Registration Act bars states from running systematic voter-roll purges in the final 90 days before a federal election, and that quiet period begins Wednesday, August 5 [1]. The arithmetic is exact: August 5 plus 90 days is November 3, Election Day. Any systematic removal program built on DHS's numbers has three days left in which it could lawfully run. After Wednesday, the 250,000 figure cannot drive a purge until the midterms are over. It can only drive a narrative.
What DHS is doing with its own list is, by Secretary Markwayne Mullin's public account, still preliminary. Mullin says the department's review of individual voter records, to determine which of the alleged noncitizens actually voted, is led by Heather Honey, a figure NPR describes as prominent in election-denial circles [1]. Note what that assignment concedes. More than two weeks after announcing a quarter-million illegal registrations, the department is still working out whether anyone on its list cast a ballot. It has yet to allege a single vote.
Here is where the four states stand as the window closes. California has refused, in the terms above. Pennsylvania and Nevada demanded the methodology, in letters from a Republican and a Democratic secretary of state respectively, and as of those letters had not received it. New Jersey acknowledged a registration-software error that misregistered some noncitizens, as the first piece in this series noted, and that acknowledgment deserves its weight: registration errors are real administrative failures, states should find and fix them, and one state did. The distance between fixing a software error and substantiating a quarter-million-voter accusation is the distance this series has been measuring for three days.
The through-line of the series has been a single request: show the list. The deadline DHS set for others has expired without the department meeting the one request everyone made of it. The deadline the law sets arrives Wednesday, and it does not take extensions.
