Justice Department orders California to check citizenship of an undisclosed list of mail voters and hold their ballots by noon Thursday, Oct. 15

Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent letters Tuesday, Oct. 13, to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan. Each came with a password-protected thumb drive. It lists people DOJ calls likely noncitizens who were sent mail ballots. The demand. Check each person's citizenship. "Segregate — not cancel" returned ballots that can't be verified. Hold back ballots not yet mailed. California began mailing ballots to every registered voter on Oct. 5. The pushback. Logan says his office does "not consider the device a secure medium." Removing a voter, he says, "must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching." California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, called the fraud claims "a lie" and "a conspiracy theory." What next. If the state cannot comply by the deadline, McCotter wrote, "the United States will have no choice but to seek emergency relief" in court.

What DOJ's voter-roll suits and fraud charges have produced:

• DOJ's Civil Rights Division has sued states 31 times over voter rolls and has lost 26 of those suits
• DOJ has charged about 90 people with election crimes this year, and 50 of them are accused of voting as noncitizens