A Federal Agency’s Voter Fraud Numbers Are Under Fire, Including Here in PA
Back in July, the Department of Homeland Security told Pennsylvania it had flagged 14,576 possible noncitizen voter registrations in the state, one of four states named in DHS's “preliminary review.” Pennsylvania's Secretary of the Commonwealth, Al Schmidt, the state's top elections official, isn't buying it. At an Aug. 13 meeting, Schmidt says DHS privately admitted it lacks “high confidence” in that 14,576 figure and has refused to hand over the underlying data that would let the state check it.
What's already on the record locally: a 2026 state audit checked more than 200,000 PennDOT applications statewide and found exactly one noncitizen who got far enough to be flagged, an application that was caught and corrected on the spot.
Pennsylvania isn't the first state to watch this play out. Trump's original July claim was more than 250,000 noncitizens across four states, Nevada among them, and Nevada got the same treatment Pennsylvania is getting now. DHS's initial claim of nearly 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada's rolls collapsed, once state election officials pushed back in an August call. DHS said it was only confident that just 185 voter IDs were non-citizens with more than 6,000 still unreviewed and over 14,000 needing further checking. DHS's Heather Honey, who's leading the project, called the agency “an open book” acting “in very good faith”; Nevada's deputy secretary of state, Mark Wlaschin, said the state still couldn't act without real, verifiable data, the same complaint Schmidt is now making about Pennsylvania's numbers.
Now the dispute is escalating. DHS is launching a coordinated Homeland Security Investigations “surge” of voter fraud probes in nine states, Pennsylvania included, running from early September through mid-October.
