THE WHITE HOUSE CARES ABOUT ELECTION-FRAUD VIBES, NOT ELECTION FRAUD

Even if you believe that there's massive, persistent, election-altering Democratic voter fraud, what the Trump administration is doing in California makes no sense:

The Trump administration on Thursday sued the state of California and a Los Angeles County official, seeking to temporarily block the state from counting mail ballots submitted by voters it suspects are noncitizens.

The suit ... would apply to some 20,000 people in the state the administration has cast as “likely noncitizens” ...

The administration has escalated its fight with California over the last week.

Days earlier, federal authorities sent a thumb drive of roughly 20,000 names they suspected were noncitizens registered to vote in California to election officials in Los Angeles County, demanding they act within 48 hours.

Data security is the Trump administration's passion:

The LA County Clerk separately said in a statement they would refuse to access contents of the thumb drive -- which was delivered to the office with a password attached on a sticky note -- "because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols."

"We do not consider the device a secure medium," LA County Clerk Dean Logan said in the statement.

(Emphasis added.)

This figure of 20,000 is quite a comedown from the administration's previous claims:

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at [a] press conference Thursday morning that ... the administration's alleged number of noncitizens on the state's voter rolls had dropped from the 190,000 flagged over the summer by the Department of Homeland Security to the 20,000 noted by the Justice Department.

"What happened to those 170,000? They just got those wrong," Bonta said.

And the administration is probably wrong about all or nearly all of the 20,000:

Similar past claims of thousands of illegal voters have fallen apart under scrutiny. Last month, election officials in Nevada said that they had examined a list provided by homeland security officials of 185 names of supposed noncitizens who had been improperly registered to vote, and found that every person on the list was a lawful citizen.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the administration is right. Let's assume that 20,000 voters are on the rolls in California who shouldn't be. And let's assume, as Republicans always do, that these real or imaginary illegal voters will all vote, and will all vote Democratic.

Would that even tip the midterms in the GOP's favor? Nope. California does have 52 seats in the House of Representatives, most of which will be Democratic. But it has few genuinely contested seats. Contested seats are all over the country, but not really in California.

The administration says California is letting 20,000 non-citizens vote in California. Do you know how many Californians cast House votes in the last midterms, in 2022? More than 10 million. Twenty thousand is 0.2% of 10 million. Very few elections are won by 0.2% or less.

The administration sent that thumb drive with the password attached on a sticky note to Los Angeles County. Let's assume that all of those 20,000 real or imaginary non-citizen voters are in L.A. County -- a massive county with a population of more than 9 million. How likely is it that these allegedly illegal votes will tip a House race?

Not very. There are 18 congressional districts that are wholly or partly in L.A. County -- districts 23, 26 through 32, 34 through 38, and 41 through 45. Every one of these is ranked as "solid D" by the Cook Political Report, with the exception of CA-23 ("solid R") and CA-45 ("likely D"). Not one of these is a swing district -- in fact, California has only three swing districts, all outside L.A. County.

So in a year when Democrats are likely to win the House by far more than three seats, it's next to impossible that 20,000 votes, distributed across a massive county or a massive state (it's not clear which), would decide the House, even in the unlikely event that the administration is right about the eligibility of those voters. (Beyond that, the state has no Senate race this year, the marquee mayor's race in Los Angeles is between two Democrats, and polls show that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate is leading the Republican candidate by more than 20 points.)

But this isn't about preventing voter fraud. It's about giving Fox News addicts -- including President Trump -- a vibes-based reason to believe there's fraud. The Trumpers wanted to give California and L.A. County an absurdly brief period to deal with this, 48 hours, in the hope that there'd be no response and they could say, "See? A cover-up!" They're suing even though, as The New York Times notes, "Over the past 18 months, the Trump administration has sued California and other states over voter rolls, and has lost resoundingly in court." The late filing suggests that they actually hope to be rebuffed -- again, so they can say the system is rigged against them.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former DOJ voting rights attorney ... said that timing made it appear DOJ was “almost seeming to try to set California up,” particularly because federal law restricts systematic voter-list maintenance during the 90 days immediately preceding a federal election.

Think about this. The government is supposed to do things for the public. You might not always like the way the government goes about this -- for instance, the Trump administration is fighting a war, imposing tariffs, and pursuing a heavy-handed and frequently brutal immigration crackdown in ways that are broadly unpopular -- but at least these are policy pursuits.

What the administration is doing in California isn't an attempt to crack down on (real or imagined) electoral fraud. It's an attempt to generate content for the right-wing media. It's designed to make right-leaning voters angry enough to vote Republican. It's also designed to please the president, who, when he thinks voter fraud, thinks Hispanic immigrants and Democratic states, and thus California.

The administration is making unlawful demands on California for the same reason it's targeting Ilhan Omar rather than, say, immigrant drug gangs -- because California and Omar make Fox viewers, and specifically the president, extremely angry. It's not governance -- it's taxpayer-funded ragebait.