Justice Department demands verification for ballots it is also asking a federal court to stop counting.

…(cont) That's the same week, more or less, the department also sued to block Alaska's Senate certification if the Republican running there loses — a filing that doesn't name a single disputed ballot, just a theory about confusion between two men with the same last name. I mention it here only because it's in the same notebook, four pages before California, written in the same week as the vow.

October 17th: the department warns county ballot counters they could face criminal prosecution for processing ballots tied to what it's calling twenty thousand suspected noncitizen voters. October 19th through the 21st: twenty-eight people, green card holders, charged under an operation called Protect the Vote — eleven of them arrested, one man from Belize accused of lying on a voter form. These are two different lists, far as I can find written down — the twenty thousand and the twenty-eight — and nothing in my notebook says whether they overlap.

Here's where I want you to picture your own bank line for a second, not because it's a perfect comparison, just because you've stood in one. A teller marks your deposit "hold for review." You don't get shown a counterfeit bill, and you don't get the money, until somebody, somewhere, decides the hold was right. Multiply that by each ballot a county registrar is now being told to set aside.

Which brings me to Thursday — a different Thursday, the 22nd — when the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles asked a federal court to halt the count, citing that same twenty-thousand figure. "Every minute that goes by," Essayli said, "American citizen votes are being diluted." The next day, Friday the 23rd, letters went out — not just to Los Angeles County, but to registrars across the state — demanding they set aside and verify any ballot the department calls "likely" noncitizen, under threat of what the letters call "significant federal scrutiny."

Zero. That's how many of the ballots named in either the Thursday motion or the Friday letters anyone has shown, in open court, to have actually been cast by a noncitizen. Not flagged — shown. I wrote that number down plain, no circle around it, and I'm leaving it alone.

So: two states, three filings, one week, the word "improperly" sitting on a page four entries back from all of it. Before you close this — one more thing I can't find in my own notebook, maybe you can find it in yours: the letter that went out Friday to registrars across California never says how many ballots are on its list. The motion from Thursday does — twenty thousand. Does the Friday letter put a number on how many ballots it's asking your county to pull and set aside?