Noncitizen-vote dragnet subpoenas a secretary of state, sends armed agents door to door, charges one voter in Indiana.

…(cont) September nineteenth. The NAACP and a coalition of civil rights groups sued the other direction, asking a federal court to keep armed agents away from polling places in November, on the theory that an armed agent near a ballot box intimidates the people who are allowed to be there same as the people who aren't. Two lawsuits, same month, aimed at each other across the same subject. I underlined that part.

Then the list. Twenty thousand names out of Los Angeles County, called "likely noncitizens" by the office that compiled it. I have the county's own preliminary number here — a high percentage of that twenty thousand were born in this country. Born here. And the county says, on the record, that it has no independent way to confirm citizenship for any voter on that list, or off it. Six days later Texas told a judge its own registration system had failed — six hundred thousand applications backed up, days before early voting opened. Does that backlog have anything to do with citizenship? Nothing in the lawsuit says it does. I wrote it down anyway.

This week it got a body to it. Agents from Homeland Security, armed, in uniform, started knocking on doors asking people whether they were citizens and whether they were registered to vote. The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed New Jersey's acting secretary of state the same week, over sixty-six hundred names somebody flagged on that state's rolls. Twenty thousand in California. Sixty-six hundred in New Jersey. Twenty-six thousand six hundred names, two states, one week.

And then Indiana, which I kept separate because it's the only number in this whole stack with a courtroom attached to it. A charge, filed Wednesday, against one person, for voting in four federal elections. One. I checked the page twice because I was sure I'd copied it wrong. I hadn't.

My car needs a fan belt again, which has nothing to do with any of this except that I was sitting in the lot waiting on the part when I did the arithmetic. Twenty-six thousand six hundred names between two states this week. One case anybody has actually walked into a courtroom with. Does an operation this size need an armed agent at a door to find out what a county already told it in its preliminary read — that most of the twenty thousand were born here? Does a subpoena answer a number, or does it just move the number into a different building?

Across every list in this story, state and federal — California's twenty thousand, New Jersey's sixty-six hundred — Indiana's got the only one that's become an actual charge in a courtroom. The agency knocking on doors hasn't produced one yet. The agency being subpoenaed hasn't produced one yet. Which of these three things has actually gone to court this week, and which two are still just lists? Oh — before you go. Page nine. The one I said I couldn't find at the start. It was Indiana's docket number, and it was sitting right on top the whole time.