Blocked fourth time, DOJ probes nonprofits for freely sharing the voter data it just subpoenaed.

As it ran on the front

On August 26th the Supreme Court's conservative majority voted six to three to let Donald Trump's mail-ballot order stand, ruling that California and twenty-two other states lacked standing to challenge it. The order directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state lists of who counts as an eligible voter, then hands those lists to the Postal Service to decide who gets to vote by mail at all. Two days later, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked it again anyway, and the Justice Department filed its appeal to the First Circuit that same Friday — the fast-track option, the one you file when you expect to lose in this courtroom and win in a friendlier one. On September 1st, Senator Richard Blumenthal released a whistleblower complaint alleging the Postal Service had rushed its new ballot-verification system into production, timed to surface hours before the administration's own emergency-relief deadline at the First Circuit. Three days after that, on Friday, Judge Talwani blocked the order a fourth time. Ballots had already started going out to voters.

That's the sequence: nine days, four rulings, one order still not implemented. Ordinarily a losing streak like that ends in a settlement, or a quieter version of the same rule, or someone getting reassigned. Instead, the same Friday the fourth block landed, the administration opened three new fronts at once. It subpoenaed Nevada for its voter rolls. It asked the Department of Homeland Security to examine the machines that count the votes. And it asked the Justice Department to investigate the nonprofit groups that already hand over that same voter data, for free, to anyone who asks — including, apparently, the government currently subpoenaing it.…