Federal officials disband election-threat unit, then investigate powdery letters sent to election offices

…(cont) I've got a lock on my garage somebody installed for free a few years back, after a run of break-ins down the block. Lock goes in, the trouble stops, and after a while you forget there was ever a reason for it — it's just there, doing a job you don't think about, until the morning you notice it's gone and you can't put your finger on when it left. Was it there in June? You'd have to ask whoever took it off, and they're not the one who tells you.

What I can tell you is what moved into that space. One day after the report ran — October 2nd — Georgia's State Election Board, Republican-led, sent a letter to the Justice Department. What did it ask for? An investigation into the state's voting systems, additional security measures, a little over a month before the midterms. So the machines got a federal ask, in writing, with a date attached to it.

Two weeks after the report ran, three wire services had something new on the desk. The Guardian's version is specific: Louisiana and Oklahoma received envelopes with a powdery substance and evacuated their offices; a similar package addressed to the Ohio secretary of state was intercepted by the Postal Service before anyone opened it. The BBC confirms all three states by name — Louisiana, Oklahoma, Ohio. CBS's item is shorter: state election officials and congressional offices, unknown substances, and it doesn't name a single state. Three wire services on the same week's story. Two of them name the same three states. One of them, asked to say where, doesn't.

The FBI and the Postal Inspection Service are on the letters now, which is the right agency doing the right job, same as it would be whether or not a different body had stopped doing a related job sometime earlier this year. I'm not going to tell you those two facts are connected, because I don't have a date that lines them up, and neither, as far as I can find, does the report.

Oh — and before I let you go. That sentence I liked so much, the one with the clean subject and the clean verb? Go back and read it one more time. It doesn't say "bodies were allowed to lapse." It doesn't say "oversight lapsed." It names who did it: the administration. Not a passive sentence hiding the actor behind a semicolon — an actor, doing a verb, to an object that used to watch the mail for exactly this. The report already told you who closed it. I just think a sentence that clean is worth reading twice before you fold the page.