Pennsylvania’s top election official is pushing back against the Trump administration’s claim that more than 14,000 potential noncitizens may be registered to vote in the state, demanding that the federal government disclose how it reached that number.
In a letter sent Wednesday to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said the federal government has not disclosed the methodology or data source it used to identify the potential noncitizens. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State said Thursday that the actual list of names still has not been shared with the state.
“As you know, past analyses of voter lists have relied on faulty methodologies that can lead to inaccurate results and false claims about the citizenship status of eligible voters,” Schmidt wrote. He added that the US Citizenship and Immigration Services official who oversees the federal program at issue “has ‘acknowledged that the system can’t always find the most current citizenship information for people not born in the U.S.'”
The standoff traces back to a July 17 primetime address in which President Trump alleged that the Department of Homeland Security had identified more than 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls of California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. The same day, Mullin wrote to Schmidt that a “preliminary review” had revealed “there may be as many as 14,576 non-citizens registered to vote in Pennsylvania.”
DHS has not publicly disclosed, or disclosed to the four states, precisely how it identified the potential noncitizen registrants. Letters to the states said the department used publicly available information and matched some of the potential noncitizens using Social Security numbers. All four states have refused to provide the federal government versions of their voter rolls containing that information, saying state law prohibits disclosure.
The system behind the federal claims, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, has erroneously flagged some citizens as ineligible to vote. A federal judge recently blocked an overhaul of the program, citing in part its accuracy problems, and ProPublica has documented cases in which the citizenship tool caused confusion and errors for US citizens.
The dispute sets up a confrontation over election administration ahead of the 2026 midterms, with state officials defending the integrity of their voter rolls against federal claims they say rest on undisclosed and potentially faulty data. DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Schmidt’s letter.
Sources: Pennsylvania Capital-Star, Votebeat, ProPublica