Trump Votes in Person This Time. His Justice Department Wants California to Hold Back Thousands of Mail Ballots

On Saturday afternoon, President Trump and the first lady voted early, in person, at the Palm Beach County elections office, according to WPBF and USA Today. He told reporters he voted Republican "very much so." Fine. That's his right.

Here's the thing, though. USA Today reported he voted by mail in Florida's March special election and again in the August primary. He's been one of mail voting's loudest critics while using it himself.

Meanwhile, out West, his Justice Department sent letters Friday to 57 of California's 58 counties, the LA Times reported, giving them 48 hours to check federal lists of people it calls "likely" noncitizens and set aside those people's mail ballots. The original letter to LA County asked officials not to even verify signatures on those ballots until citizenship is confirmed. California's secretary of state says the feds won't explain how they built the lists, and LA County found accuracy problems in a sample.

Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime, and nobody should defend it. But there's a difference between catching people who broke the law and freezing thousands of ballots off a list nobody can check, nine days before an election.

What we still don't know: how the federal lists were made, how many citizens are on them, and what a federal judge in Los Angeles does at Tuesday's hearing.