Read California’s answer in court this week and then read it again, because the second time through it stops sounding like a defense.

The Justice Department says about 20,000 people it believes are not citizens were mailed ballots this month. It did not ask for anybody to be removed from the rolls. It asked for those ballots to be set to one side, unopened, until somebody could determine whether the people who returned them were allowed to vote.

Here is what the state did not say in response.

It did not say the list is wrong. It did not say the 20,000 are citizens. It did not produce a single name and say, this man is a citizen and you have slandered him.

What it said instead is that county election offices have no authority to check citizenship, no access to the federal records that would let them check, and that in any case the question arrives too late, because once a ballot clears signature verification it is pulled out of the envelope with the name on it and dropped into the stack with everything else.

Which is true. That is how the system works.

That is the part I want you to sit with, because it is not a technicality. It is the design.

They built a machine that cannot be audited and then offered the fact that it cannot be audited as proof that nothing is wrong with it. No evidence of a problem, because evidence was engineered out of the process on purpose. Los Angeles County alone has mailed 5.9 million ballots and already run 331,000 of them through.

Ask what that defense would sound like anywhere else in your life.

A bank that says it cannot tell you who withdrew the money because it shreds the signature card the moment the cash goes out. A pharmacy that cannot say who collected the prescription because the name is separated from the bottle at the counter. You would not call that privacy. You would call it a system built by somebody who did not want to be asked.

And notice that nobody in this fight is claiming the names are made up.

Federal prosecutors charged 28 people in California last week with registering, and in some cases voting, as noncitizens. The department says all 28 came off that same list of 20,000. It also says all 28 are still registered to vote right now.

Not alleged to be on the list. Charged. In court. Still registered.

The county’s own rebuttal is that in a sample of 200 records, 112 were already cancelled or inactive. Set aside whether that is a good sample. Run it forward and it still concedes that 88 of 200 were live. Scale that and you are not arguing about whether there is a problem, you are haggling over its size.

I want to be careful here, because the other side is desperate for me not to be.

I am not telling you an election was stolen. I do not know what is in those 20,000 envelopes and neither does anybody writing about it, which is the entire point. What I am telling you is that California has arranged things so that question can never be answered, and then treats the silence as a verdict in its favor.

That is not integrity. Integrity is what survives an audit. What they have is an alibi.

And it is worth asking why the urgency only runs one direction.

The Justice Department’s filing used the phrase “untraceable disenfranchisement.” That is a precise thing. Every ballot cast by somebody who had no right to cast one cancels out an American who did, and because the envelope is already gone, the citizen whose vote got erased will never find out it happened and could never prove it if he suspected.

There is no court he can go to. There is no recount that finds it. The harm is real and it is permanent and it is invisible, which is exactly why the people running this system are comfortable with it.

Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries went to federal court on October 21 to stop the administration cleaning noncitizens off state rolls. Think about what it takes to file that lawsuit eleven days before an election and expect applause.

Ten days out now.

Nothing in this changes what you do about it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. You cannot fix California’s envelope procedure from your kitchen. What you can do is make the number too big to sit inside the margin where any of this matters.

That is the whole answer to a system you cannot audit. Not despair, and not a conspiracy theory. Turnout so far past the question that nobody has to ask it.

Vote early if your state allows it. Then go find three people who are registered, who agree with you, and who are planning to get around to it.

Planning to is not voting. Drag them.