Justice Department sues to block Alaska's certification only if the Republican loses; the election is ten days away.

…(cont) The suit asks a court to stop Alaska from certifying its Senate race if Senator Dan Sullivan loses to Mary Peltola. Not if a count comes back crooked. Not if the confusion turns up in the numbers somewhere. If the Republican loses. The president said Friday he had instructed his administration to file it, and it goes in before the counting, with the election less than two weeks out.

I wrote this down Friday because I wanted the words in the right order, and — hold on, it is back here under a phone number — ah. Here it is. The Attorney General said the Department would not "improperly" block any state's certification. That is one word carrying a great deal of freight in a short sentence.

Here is the part I keep turning over. The president said Friday that two Republicans with similar names are on that ballot. A columnist said on Fox Business the same day that Democrats put up a guy named Dan Sullivan with a different middle name to confuse voters. Same ballot, same afternoon, two sides of the same aisle. Can both of those be a description of one ballot?

Nine days before the Alaska filing, the same Department sued California over alleged noncitizen voting, told every county to set aside the ballots it considers "likely noncitizen," and asked a federal court to halt the count. In Los Angeles County that is twenty thousand ballots pulled out of the pile before anybody finishes going through it. Out in my garage there is a coffee can of bolts I inherited with the house, and no thread gauge anywhere in the place — it went out with the car that needed the fan belt. So I eyeball them. The ones that look metric go in a second can, the second can goes up on the shelf, and the shelf is now, I tell myself, sorted. Not one bolt has been measured. When a county sets aside the likely ones, what is it holding them up against? Of those twenty thousand, how many has anyone shown to be what the letter says they are likely to be?

The Department has been told about this once already. On 10 September a federal appeals court blocked an earlier push on mail voting and called it likely unlawful. And on 1 October, in the middle of all this filing, former officials told the Guardian the administration had walked away from the security bodies meant to investigate foreign actors and domestic terrorists going after our elections, while it chased unverified claims of noncitizen fraud. Five days later, the Guardian reported, election deniers were back on friendly television with fresh warnings about ballot security.

Oh — one more thing before you lock up, and then I am out of your hair. There is a person in this file who was actually convicted of breaching a voting system, a system she swore to protect. Tina Peters served under two years for it. The president has gone to extraordinary lengths for her. In September a conservative California county north of Sacramento offered her the job of running its elections, and her would-be boss said she turned it down because she is running around the country securing elections. California is the state whose count this Department wants halted. I am sorry to drag that word back out — I only meant to use it the once. Does the Attorney General's sentence say which of this month's filings he would file under improperly?