DOJ charges 16 noncitizens under a voter law a judge struck down four days earlier

…(cont) September 2nd — Common Dreams, reporting on the New York Times' story — says the Department of Homeland Security had hundreds of agents going through state voter rolls, an operation DHS called, internally, the Unlawful Voter Initiative. That's the name they gave it. I didn't write that down wrong.

September 4th, the Washington Examiner: five people charged with illegally voting, or helping someone register to vote, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. Two of the five identified as illegal immigrants, two more as noncitizens, one a U.S. citizen accused of assisting. That's two days after the DHS story. Two, not several. I counted it twice to be sure I had it right before I wrote it down a second time.

September 30th, the Guardian: the Department of Justice indicted ten more individuals on noncitizen-voting charges, in Minnesota this time. The paper called it the sixth announcement of its kind that month. Sixth. I read that one twice too.

Then October 2nd. The date I already had.

And then October 6th — the Daily Caller, today's wire: the Department of Justice charged sixteen noncitizens with voter fraud and illegal voting. Ten of the sixteen, the story says, were in Minnesota.

Whether those ten are the same ten from September 30th, I can't tell you. The wire from the 6th doesn't say, and the wire from the 30th doesn't either, so I'm leaving that where I found it — two facts, same state, same number, sitting on the same page without an introduction between them.

Here's where I'd usually walk out to the garage, because the fan belt on my car is a good stand-in for a thing you keep using after somebody's told you it's no good. But I didn't go near the garage this week. I went out to the driveway instead, to the car itself, because the inspection sticker on the windshield has its own date glued right onto the glass. After that date passes, the sticker doesn't peel itself off. It just stops being good for anything. The glass doesn't know the date went by. The car doesn't get a new piece of paper handed to it; it just keeps sitting there, stickered, same as the day before.

My wife asked what I was writing about tonight. I told her I wasn't sure yet. That part was true when I said it.

Oh — hold on, before you go. One more thing, and I'm sorry, because I brought this up once already and I don't like repeating myself inside the same column. But let me read the two dates back one more time, the other direction. Not which one came first — we've settled that, October 2nd, then October 6th. What I want to know is whether the paper the sixteen were charged under on the 6th carries a date on it earlier than the 2nd. Does the indictment cite the statute the way it stood before the ruling, or after?