DHS claimed 250K noncitizens are registered to vote across 4 states. Here’s the truth

In July 2026, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that more than 250,000 non-U.S. citizens were registered to vote across four states: California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Snopes readers emailed asking us to review the claim.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have repeatedly made baseless claims about the integrity of elections in the United States. Snopes is just one of many outlets, including conservative ones, that has reviewed and disproved Trump’s many allegations of widespread voter fraud.

As with the other claims questioning the integrity of elections, there is zero evidence to support this claim. It is false. 

We contacted the Department of Homeland Security and elections representatives in all four states for comment on this story. 

DHS responded to our email with a copy of the same news release we were requesting more information about but did not provide any new information. We also heard back from California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, whose responses are detailed below.

Trump made the claim in a July 16 speech, using the supposed data to advocate for the Republican-backed SAVE America Act, which would require voters to present proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID at the ballot box. 

DHS published a news release sharing the claim the same day:

DHS found that there may be as many as:

• 190,832 non-citizens registered to vote in California.
• 35,152 non-citizens registered to vote in New Jersey.
• 15,903 non-citizens registered to vote in Nevada.
• 14,576 non-citizens registered to vote in Pennsylvania.

It’s worth noting that the claim was about the alleged number of registrations, not number of ballots cast, and that the department used the phrase “there may be as many as” to describe its numbers. DHS provided no evidence supporting its conclusion, and Snopes could not reproduce the findings.

According to Ballotpedia, the city of San Francisco allows noncitizen parents to vote in local school board elections. But while that may explain California’s much-higher number, there still was no clear explanation for how DHS arrived at that figure.

In a statement emailed to Snopes, the California secretary of state’s office called the allegation “fallacious” and “unsubstantiated.” The office also provided Snopes a copy of the letter sent to the state by DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and the state’s reply, noting that DHS had not provided enough information for the state to do anything about the alleged ineligible voters.

Snopes separately reported on the numbers in New Jersey, where Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced in late July 2026 that between 2023 and 2024, 6,600 noncitizens had inadvertently been registered to vote because of a software error. That number is still significantly less than the 35,000 claimed by DHS, and Sherrill noted that those voters cast fewer than 400 ballots total statewide, not enough to swing a large election. Sherrill’s office said she was working to remove the ineligible voters from voter rolls and would no longer work with the company that provided the glitched software.

The state of Nevada categorically denied the allegation to The New York Times, providing data showing that only 138 of the state’s 2.1 million active voters did not provide a Nevada driver’s license or Social Security number when registering, information that can immediately be run through state and federal databases to verify citizenship. (Snopes contacted the Nevada secretary of state in the hopes of independently receiving the same information, but had not heard back at time of publication.)

Pennyslvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, also disputed the claim in a statement to Snopes. “Pennsylvania follows all state and federal laws when it comes to our elections, and our voter rolls are properly maintained and updated,” the statement began. Like his counterpart in California, Schmidt asked DHS to send its methodology and list of names so his staff could conduct a more thorough review, but noted that noncitizen voting is incredibly rare.

Finally, there’s plenty of evidence showing that DHS’s system regularly counts some U.S. citizens as noncitizens when making its estimates. A review by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research noted that an audit in Iowa initially marked 2,176 records that may have belonged to noncitizens. Upon further investigation, the number dropped to 277, only 35 of whom cast ballots in 2024. Similarly, a 2024 audit of Georgia’s 8.2 million voter records found just 20 noncitizens on the voter rolls. 

For further reading, we’ve separately investigated several claims about how the SAVE America Act might affect voters if passed.

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