Judge asks how suspects were found; Justice Department answers with subpoenas, a $1 million bounty, and friendly judges.

…(cont) I took the car in last month for a noise under the hood and asked the man a plain question: what's wrong with it. He didn't answer that. He wrote up an invoice for parts he hadn't ordered yet and told me to come back Thursday. I paid him anyway, because apparently that's how it goes now — you ask a question, a bill comes back instead — and I didn't think much of it until this week, when I noticed it isn't only my garage.

Go back to October 17th. The Justice Department sent a letter to California election officials warning that anyone who "knowingly tabulates" ballots cast by noncitizens risks prosecution. Did the letter explain how the department had identified which ballots those were? Or did it only say what happens to the people counting them?

Two days earlier than that, on October 15th, in Texas, a computer failure had left almost six hundred thousand voter registration applications stuck in the system, just as early voting was set to open. Is a stuck application the same thing as a fraudulent one? Did the state call the glitch itself a crime, or just a glitch?

On October 26th, the president posted that a million dollars would go to anyone reporting voter fraud, past elections or the midterms — payable, the post specifies, upon the arrest and conviction of whoever's responsible. Has an arrest been announced yet, anywhere, against anyone? Has a conviction?

The next day, October 27th, a nationwide review of judicial assignments found that fifty-three of those sixty marquee races sit in districts or states with at least one Trump-appointed, election-denying judge seated to hear whatever challenge comes. Fifty-three of sixty — is that most of the map, or some of it?

So: a warning letter on the 17th. A bounty with no name attached to it on the 26th. A judge roster on the 27th. That's the sequence I had laid out last night, if you want to call a glovebox full of gas receipts a dashboard.

Oh — one more thing, and I nearly left without it, same as I nearly left that garage without reading my own invoice closely enough to catch the line items I hadn't agreed to. A nationwide reporting project published today found this isn't only a California story. It found the same shape — officials questioned, then subpoenaed, then left to explain themselves in a courtroom instead of to the public — running through election offices in more than one battleground state at once. The question a federal judge in California asked this month was how the department identified its suspects in the first place. Before you go: in any of those states, has anybody answered that yet?