Presumption of Irregularity · November 5, 2026

Please hold.

Commentary. Opinions are mine; the evidence is linked.

The day after the election, the people we elected didn’t spend the day defending lawsuits in every swing state. They sent letters telling agency heads not to delete anything.

That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole thing.

What went out

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the top Democrat on House Homeland Security, wrote DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Nov. 4. He wants written assurance by Nov. 11 “that Departmental records, documents, data, and information have not been and will not be destroyed, modified, removed, transferred, or otherwise rendered inaccessible,” and says the committee “intends to closely observe the compliance of the Department—and all its components” (House Homeland Security Democrats). D
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), the top Democrat on Education and Workforce, sent the same kind of notice to 10 departments and agencies, including Education, Labor, HHS and the NLRB, with a Nov. 18 deadline (Inside Higher Ed; Government Executive). R

And this isn’t new. Back on June 26, after Trump talked about taking over the voting, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sen. Mark Warner and 19 other Senate Democrats wrote Mullin, Blanche, Hegseth and the acting intelligence director to “preserve all existing and future records and materials on election-related activities and efforts,” including messages on Signal and personal accounts (Senate Democrats). D So the next time someone online asks why Schumer isn’t “saying something,” he was saying it in writing, to the people who’d have to answer for it, four months ago.

Why a letter beats a press conference

A preservation letter is a legal hold. It doesn’t ask anyone to do anything new. It tells them, in writing, that the records already belong to the public and that Congress is coming for them.

The law was already there. The Federal Records Act requires agency heads to preserve records. Hiding, removing or destroying a federal record is a crime under 18 U.S.C. 2071, up to three years, and a custodian who does it forfeits the office and can’t hold federal office again. Destroying records to obstruct a federal matter is a separate felony with up to 20 years (18 U.S.C. 1519). D

What the letter adds is notice. Once it lands, nobody gets to say they didn’t know these records mattered. I

That’s why I think of these letters as corruption checkmate. Every official who gets one has exactly two moves:

Keep everything. Then the records come out in January, whatever they show. And the career people who kept them are the civil servants the next administration, and the country, should want to keep.
Delete something. Then that’s the story, and it’s a crime with your name on it, after a dated letter that told you not to.

There’s no third square. I

It’s like serving Al Capone a notice, at the height of his empire, that you already have him on tax evasion and you’ll be checking the books. The difference is that this administration thinks it’s Capone, and it isn’t. Capone had loyal soldiers. A legal hold works on one person at a time, at their desk, deciding whether their boss is worth a felony. I

They taught us this move

DOJ wrote election officials in all 50 states on Oct. 29, ordering them to keep ballots and voter-registration records for 22 months after a federal election: “It is a crime to willfully fail to comply with Section 20701” (Votebeat via Spotlight PA). R And on Election Day, Secretary Mullin told Fox: “After this election, we’ll be gathering all the data, we’ll be gathering the voting logs, and we’ll be going through those and making sure that no illegals voted” (NPR, All Things Considered transcript). D

Fine. Preservation runs both ways. Whatever DHS gathers, whatever lists it built, whatever it sent to states and whatever it told the people who count ballots, that’s now a record Congress has asked it to keep.

This is why every ballot counted

None of this works if you’re busy playing defense. NPR’s Miles Parks put it plainly: “the thing I heard over and over again from experts is that if this had come down to one or two seats, it may have been a different story last night” (NPR). R If the margins had been thin, Democrats would have spent Wednesday in court in every swing state, and the “public confidence” story would be writing itself, the one that lets a DHS secretary call an election a “significant incident.”

Instead people voted in numbers too big to argue with. That turned the oversight power on, and it left room to go looking.

Which is why we’re turning to Mississippi next. Rep. Thompson, who sent the DHS letter, represents Mississippi. His state made about 230,000 voters inactive before Election Day using unverified credit-bureau data, and its Senate race is close enough that their affidavit ballots matter (our board, row 16). More on that soon.

For now: the letters are dated, the clocks are running, and the records are on hold.

Please hold. Your call is important to us.

Tags: oversight, Congress, records, DHS, DOJ, Mississippi · All posts · RSS · Follow on X or Bluesky, or get posts by email on Substack · Questions or records requests: amanda.everyballotcounts@gmail.com