DOJ sues California over 'noncitizen' voter list where a high percentage are US-born

…(cont) Two days after that, a second letter went out, this one warning the registrar and the secretary of state that tabulating a ballot from anyone on that list could mean a criminal referral. I wrote down the word they used — "knowingly." Knowingly tabulate. Is that a word you can fairly apply to a county clerk who has no way to know?

Because here's the part I keep turning over, and I keep turning it over at the toll plaza, of all places, waiting for the arm to lift. Nobody checks who's driving there. The transponder clears, the gate goes up, and the authority that built that system took your word for it the day you signed up for the account. Los Angeles County's own top federal prosecutor said this week, on the record, that election officials have no independent way to confirm anyone's citizenship beyond taking their word for it. Does that admission cover only the twenty thousand names on this particular list, or does it cover every voter registered in that county? I don't see a limit written into the quote. Do you?

The quote didn't stand alone for long. Los Angeles County put out its own preliminary count that same afternoon: a high percentage of the people on that twenty-thousand-name list, the county said, were people who told the county they were born in the United States. Not noncitizens. Not close, if a high percentage means what it usually means when a county says it out loud. If the list that triggered the lawsuit, and the letters, and the threat of prosecution turns out to run heavy with citizens born in this country, how many names were left over once you set those aside? My notes don't have that number. I don't think anyone's does yet.

Wait — hold on, one thing before I close this. The lawsuit was filed on the fifteenth. The county's count of how many names on that list belong to people born here came back on the twenty-first, six days later, four days after the threat letter. So when the department went to court to force those ballots out, did it already have that count in hand? I don't have a note that says yes. The only number I had written down that week, before any of it started, was forty-eight hours.