Guitarist Julian Lage’s lessons from a lifetime of accolades

Well, what happened is that things cooled down, actually, for quite a while.

As you said, over the summer, the federal government, the Department of Homeland Security said, we think there are 190,000 non-citizens on your voter list.

And California, like any good teacher, said, show your work.

Give us those numbers.

Tell us how you arrived there.

And as far as we know and reporting indicates, the federal government basically went quiet until after California started mailing out ballots in October.

And then what heated up last week is that the federal government, the Department of Justice, sent a letter.

to the California Secretary of State and the LA County Red Star and said, here's a thumb drive.

It has a list of 20,000 names of people who we believe are non-citizens and are improperly on your voter roll.

Now, We should pause here for a minute.

One hundred ninety thousand to twenty thousand.

I think we're looking at like an 88 to 90 percent decrease in the number of names that the federal government is initially pointing to.

But what led us here is California and L.A. County said no.

We don't know if we can look at this thumb drive.

It raises privacy concerns and security concerns.

And that no ultimately led to the Department of Justice filing a lawsuit last week.

Plus, the DOJ gave them, what, 48 hours to comply to verify the names of 20,000 people?

That's right.

To either verify independently or to say, don't mail ballots to these people.

Or if you already have and they're returned, then segregate them.

We should note here that election administration officials that I've seen talk about this profusely.

privately and publicly have said that 48 hours is essentially an impossible turnaround time.

And again, we should remember that the accusations of many non-citizens being on California's voter rolls started months ago.

So then the DOJ said they would actually hold elections officials accountable and maybe they risk criminal prosecution if they process the votes of suspected non-citizen voters.

How can they do that?