I blogged on Wednesday about the DOJ’s lawsuit against the Orange County registrar for access to voting records, and noted that the suit seemed like a weird one from DOJ.  DOJ wanted information, but the stakes for DOJ seemed fairly small, the information they were seeking really wouldn’t be useful for evaluating compliance with the laws they cited, it didn’t seem like their legal arguments entitle them to the relief they’re seeking, and these sorts of things normally just get worked out in informal correspondence without a lawsuit.

Two other things that (to their credit) the OC Register was on top of Wednesday night actually make the case even weirder. 

First, there was informal correspondence, including an offer to give the DOJ exactly what they wanted (access to unredacted information, albeit pursuant to a confidentiality agreement that would make sure they’re only using the info for proper governmental purposes) the night before the case was filed.  (The letters are here, from the registrar’s LinkedIn page: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And boy, seeing typos in the official communications from Main Justice is a new and different look.)  That is, the night before the suit, the registrar offered DOJ a mechanism to give them what they wanted, as long as it was for a proper purpose.  DOJ’s response was a lawsuit.  That’s weird.

Second, the OC Register noted that Michael Gates posted on X in October of last year a ballot that he said he was presented, and which certainly seems to fit the origin story in the suit’s complaint itself of the predicate for this case.  Gates was at that point the City Attorney for Huntington Beach (in Orange County), and is the now the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division (a role with which I’m familiar).  I thought it was odd that Gates personally signed the complaint – there’s nothing at all inherently improper about that, but it’s almost always the career line attorney who’d sign a case like this for the Civil Rights Division.  (I can’t remember ever signing the filed paperwork on behalf of the Division while I was in the DAAG role.)  But if this is the same ballot, I think that also makes Gates a witness in the matter – and at least to me, a no-brainer candidate for recusal from any lawyering work on the case while at DOJ, much less a signature line that indicates primary responsibility.  To be clear, that’s an ”if.”  But the plot thicks.