Justice Department's voter list, rejected in three courts, promoted to grand jury subpoenas five days before the election.

…(cont) Up in Washington State they got a version of the same ask. The department wanted Secretary of State Steve Hobbs to tell his election officials to set aside ballots for hundreds of people the federal government had identified as alleged noncitizens. Hobbs wrote back Wednesday — I've got his words here, give me a second — "Without individualized proof of ineligibility," he said, it would not be done, and he called the request "profoundly disappointing." His office went through the list and found several errors in it. That's his word, disappointing, not mine. The errors are the part I keep wanting to ask about.

There's a store on my corner, Marty's, and Marty keeps a list taped by the register, names of people whose checks came back on him. Short list, Marty's handwriting. Say I come in for cigars and my name's on it, spelled a little wrong, because Marty writes about the way Marty drives. Now, does Marty hand my check back because the list says so, or does he look at the check? I've always figured he looks at the check. He'd say, Lou, you're on here, let's find out how you got on here. What he wouldn't do is keep the list and start asking the stock boy questions under oath.

I should have been asking this in September. In September a whistleblower report said Homeland Security employees were told to pose as voters while searching state voter rolls, and that the searches likely violated state law and could wrongly flag citizens. On October 9 a federal judge ruled the department's policy of collecting unredacted state voter rolls to run them against a federal immigration database was unlawful — seventy-eight pages, privacy laws. On October 22 another federal judge found Homeland Security violated the Voting Rights Act by sending agents door to door asking people about their immigration status and whether they had voted. Three rulings. One list. If the list is the thing the courts keep sending back, what are the subpoenas collecting?

Former department officials told CBS this week that moves like these, this close to a vote, are uncharted waters — their phrase — and that they could influence politics. Forty years of neutrality, and the people who used to work there are the ones saying it on the record.

Oh — excuse me, before you go, I left my raincoat on your chair anyway. There's an election lawyer on Fox, J. Christian Adams, saying the SAVE database could clean these rolls up and that California and Washington still refuse to use it for verification. I believe him that they refuse. I just can't get the two pages to lie flat next to each other, because the October 9 ruling says running state voter rolls against that federal immigration database is the thing a judge called unlawful. So when the states say no to the database, are they refusing an offer, or are they obeying an order? Whichever it is, the subpoenas went out five days before the election, and the list still has the errors in it.