The Trump administration badly wants an election eve voter fraud scandal, preferably one involving undocumented immigrants supposedly stealing votes. Yet its latest attempt to conjure such a crisis in Nevada has instead produced another humiliating collapse under the weight of actual facts.

The administration has mounted a whole of government effort to portray American elections as hopelessly broken. The proposed savior, naturally, is the same man who fomented an insurrection after receiving an election result he disliked, even as dozens of court cases confirmed that result.

As the midterm elections approach, that campaign is intensifying. Unfortunately for the people hunting for mass fraud, the Nevada episode shows just how flimsy their supposedly alarming evidence can become once state officials examine it.

The Department of Homeland Security initially claimed that a staggering 15,903 noncitizens appeared on Nevada’s voter rolls. That supposed bombshell quickly shrank when the department said it had confirmed 185 noncitizen voters.

Being wrong by nearly two full orders of magnitude would already represent quite the face plant. But Nevada officials then investigated each of those 185 alleged noncitizen voters and discovered that every one of them was a citizen.

Greg Ott, a deputy attorney general in Nevada, conveyed his irritation in a letter to DHS. His message was direct and left little room for the department’s fraud narrative to hide.

“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens. You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise,” he wrote. Ott also reminded DHS that it still had not provided the list of nearly 16,000 alleged noncitizens supposedly lingering on Nevada’s voter rolls.

DHS disputed Nevada’s account and claimed the 185 people were “simply a subset of individuals that had gone through a rigorous manual review process.” Whatever rigor the department applied, it apparently failed to establish the rather important fact that all 185 were citizens.

The department’s explanation of its process did little to clear up the mess. Kimberly Vogt, described as a high level voter fraud figure at DHS, addressed Nevada officials’ questions about whether the larger list had been vetted.

“I probably wouldn’t use the sentence, ‘It hasn’t been vetted.’ Because definitely we’ve done something with it to get down to 15,000. So I wouldn’t say that,” Vogt said. “But it hasn’t had a full manual review of each one.”

That answer amounted to an acknowledgment that DHS had done something to reduce its list, while stopping short of a complete manual examination. It also offered no rescue for the department’s accusation against the 185 people Nevada reviewed and found to be citizens.

Rather than accept that its Nevada claims had disintegrated, the Trump administration is accelerating its examination of voter rolls. Reuters reports that DHS is reviewing rolls from 47 states through an effort called the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.”

The initiative combines redacted voter rolls with commercial data, bringing together very different databases in search of evidence of voter fraud. The Nevada debacle provides a glaring example of what can happen when dramatic accusations arrive before the underlying information survives meaningful scrutiny.

The timing matters because the administration is pursuing this effort near the midterm elections. Its campaign also includes attempts to wreck mail in voting, coy responses about whether troops could be deployed to polling places, and a relentless hunt for noncitizen voters.

Those efforts are already damaging confidence in the midterms, which can also damage confidence in the eventual results. The administration’s search for fraud therefore creates chaos even when its headline claims evaporate as soon as election officials check the names.

In Nevada, DHS began with 15,903 supposed noncitizens, retreated to 185 alleged cases, and then watched state officials determine that all 185 were citizens. For an administration desperate to uncover an election scandal, this latest investigation delivered a scandalous result of its own: another voter fraud claim going spectacularly nowhere.