Trump’s claims of 250,000 non-U.S. citizens on voter rolls leave some states baffled

NPR: “Two weeks after Trump officials said they had found more than 250,000 non-U.S. citizens on voter rolls in just four states, election officials are still struggling to understand where the numbers came from and what the claims may portend for federal interference in this year’s midterms. Multiple state officials told NPR they fear these unverified numbers, or similar ones unveiled closer to the general election, could be used as a pretext for warrants to allow law enforcement to interfere in vote-counting. Several reviews in recent years have found that actual voting by noncitizens is extremely rare. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversaw the voter roll analysis of four states — California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — asked the states to respond to its allegations by Thursday. But the agency has not explained its methodology or provided the states with clarity on how it came to its conclusions. “These numbers, until they’re backed up by any kind of clear, transparent methodology, should be considered made up,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. At least three of the four states’ top election officials wrote back to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, raising questions about the accuracy of the numbers and demanding answers on how DHS did the analysis. In primetime speech, Trump doesn’t provide evidence for illegal voting. Making matters even more puzzling, the Department of Justice previously sued all four states, along with more than two dozen more, for refusing to turn over versions of their voter rolls that include voters’ partial Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers. Those lawsuits have so far been unsuccessful. Yet Mullin’s letters to the states indicate his agency somehow obtained some of that sensitive data anyway. The letters say DHS analyzed publicly available voter rolls in the four states. But public voter rolls don’t include Social Security numbers, and the letters say the agency found around 118,000 voters combined in those states whose “name, date of birth, address and Social Security number match a non-citizen in our files” — raising questions about how DHS obtained voters’ Social Security numbers. “You’re suing me because I wouldn’t give you that data, that information. So where did you get it? How did you get it? And is it reliable?” asked Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, in an interview with NPR. The DOJ’s lawsuit demanding Nevada’s voter rolls with voters’ personal data is still pending, while federal judges have so far dismissed the suits in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and 15 other states. One possibility raised to NPR by election experts is that DHS relied on commercial data from a data broker to attempt to match Social Security numbers to the voter rolls, but the details are still unknown…”