{"id":287655,"date":"2026-09-16T22:48:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T22:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/287655\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T22:48:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T22:48:10","slug":"trump-administration-explains-how-it-flagged-14576-potential-noncitizen-voters-in-pennsylvania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/287655\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump administration explains how it flagged 14,576 potential noncitizen voters in Pennsylvania"},"content":{"rendered":"

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania\u2019s free newsletter here.<\/a><\/p>\n

New records provide the most detail so far about the previously opaque process by which the federal government concluded that thousands of potential noncitizens are registered to vote in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

On July 16, the day President Donald Trump delivered a high-profile speech<\/a> on election security, the Department of Homeland Security said it had found more than 250,000 potential noncitizens<\/a> registered to vote in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The states, though, called into question<\/a> the accuracy of that number and asked for more information on how it was calculated.<\/p>\n

DHS answered Pennsylvania\u2019s query on Sept. 9, according to an email to Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt<\/a> obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA. The department said the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services\u2019 Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate identified the potential noncitizens by comparing the state\u2019s publicly available voter roll to internal DHS databases.<\/p>\n

The email broke nearly two months of silence from the Trump administration over exactly how it arrived at the numbers Trump referenced in his July speech.<\/p>\n

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When DHS first informed<\/a> Pennsylvania about the potential noncitizen registered voters in July, it told the Pennsylvania Department of State that Social Security numbers had been used in some of the matches. However, this led to confusion given that Pennsylvania has not provided the Trump administration with a list of registered voters that includes Social Security numbers. <\/p>\n

But the Sept. 9 email, signed only by the DHS Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, said that DHS had not used \u201cfederal enumerators\u201d like Social Security numbers to perform the matching. Instead, it said it used fields such as first name, last name, date of birth, phone number, and address.<\/p>\n

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the conflicting information.<\/p>\n

The email also said that some of the 14,576 registered voters it flagged in Pennsylvania were firmer matches than others. \u201cThe more attributes from the individual registered voter that match an individual in DHS immigration records, the higher the confidence level of the match,\u201d the email said. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe highest confidence level of matching indicators, for example, first name, last name, middle name, date of birth, address, and phone number would be a 6-attribute match. If an individual did not have the same phone number or the same address, this would be a lower confidence match but likely still the same individual.\u201d<\/p>\n

The email went on to say that if matches were not made on all six main criteria, other indicators may have been used, such as previous addresses or spousal information.<\/p>\n

In the email, DHS said it would send Pennsylvania officials a list of the potential noncitizens it identified. \u201cEach one of the 14,576 individuals identified should be carefully reviewed by your state to determine eligibility for voting in a federal election,\u201d it wrote. <\/p>\n

The email offered Pennsylvania the choice of sending the registered voters\u2019 federal enumerators to DHS to confirm or deny their citizenship, or conducting its own analysis.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear whether the department has sent Pennsylvania the list of alleged noncitizens registered to vote since sending the email last week. The Pennsylvania Department of State did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Pennsylvania, as well as Nevada, recently called into question DHS\u2019 confidence in its own numbers.<\/p>\n

In a letter recapping an August call<\/a> with DHS representatives, Schmidt said that \u201cDHS representatives explained that they did not have high confidence\u201d in the figures they were presenting.<\/p>\n

In its Sept. 9 email, the department disputed Schmidt\u2019s framing, calling it a \u201cblatant mischaracterization.\u201d <\/p>\n

In Nevada, staff in the secretary of state\u2019s office recorded an August call<\/a> in which DHS officials said the original figure of potential noncitizens it had identified represented \u201cthe ceiling\u201d of how many noncitizens were actually on the rolls.<\/p>\n

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287656,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4998,4036,68843,28,30,29,50,119692,119693],"class_list":["post-287655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-dallas","tag-horizontal","tag-markwayne-mullin","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-politics","tag-republican-national-committee-midterm-convention","tag-u-s-secretary-of-homeland-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}