A call between Department of Homeland Security officials and Nevada election officials over the Trump administration's claims of noncitizens on the state's voter rolls produced an unscheduled correction from Nevada's deputy elections chief — about the pronunciation of his state.

As a DHS official spoke, Nevada Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Mark Wlaschin cut in.

"Sorry, super quick. I'd be remiss and every fellow Nevadan would lose their mind if I didn't correct you. It's said Nevada, not Nevahda," he said, according to a recording reported by the Guardian's Sam Levine (X post). "I grew up on the East Coast, I'm sure I got it wrong at first, but Nevada, if you don't mind, please."

The distinction is a longstanding point of pride in the Silver State: residents pronounce the middle syllable with a short "a," and the broader "Nev-AH-da" common among East Coast speakers is widely regarded locally as the mark of an outsider. In Nevada, elections are administered by the secretary of state's office, the department led by Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar as the state's chief elections officer.

The exchange, however, bookended a more consequential disagreement. Nevada officials have spent weeks pressing DHS to substantiate Secretary Markwayne Mullin's claim that nearly 16,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in the state — part of a sweeping assertion of more than 250,000 noncitizens across four states that Mullin billed as proof of widespread fraud (Raw Story investigation).

So far, the numbers have come up short. In records Nevada released and in recordings obtained by CNN and MS NOW, DHS officials acknowledged they had "confirmed" just 185 potential noncitizens through manual review and had yet to examine more than 14,000 other flagged names (CNN report).

The gap between flagged and confirmed carries legal weight. Under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, states must follow prescribed procedures — including notice to affected voters — before canceling registrations, and election administrators have long noted that database matches alone can generate false positives through shared names, outdated records and data-entry errors. Registration is also distinct from casting a ballot, which for noncitizens in federal elections is itself a federal crime; the figures at issue in Nevada concern the voter rolls.

The shortfall comes as DHS — the cabinet-level federal agency whose responsibilities include immigration enforcement — has threatened to prosecute election officials and withhold federal money from states that will not turn over voter data, pressure that Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and voting experts have called baseless. The open questions now are procedural: whether DHS completes its review of the more than 14,000 remaining flagged names, whether it supplies the substantiation Nevada has requested, and whether its prosecution and funding threats are carried out.

"I can't take something that's made up out of thin air and try to justify it," Aguilar told CNN.