As my colleague Tad DeHaven announced here earlier this week, Cato just launched the Restoring Free Enterprise project to analyze the federal government’s growing and unprecedented ownership of private US companies and to propose ways to reverse this troubling trend. The United States’ new portfolio — now encompassing 35 different companies across a range of industries — raises numerous problems that the RFE project will document, and my latest Dispatch column covers what may be the most basic one: the complete lack of explicit legal authority to do any of these equity deals. 

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Earlier this week, on October 13, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent an unusual letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber. The letter alleges that there are “likely numerous noncitizens registered to vote in the federal election in California.” According to the letter, the DOJ sent a list of the “likely noncitizens” to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan. The DOJ has asked that Los Angeles County and Secretary Weber “review the list within 48 hours to determine whether any citizens are listed.”

This is highly, highly irregular. I do not know of a previous instance in which the federal government pushed for such a large election administration action in October of an election year.

California mailed ballots out last week. The state is now fully in election mode; some Californians have already voted, and election workers have a full plate for all of October.

After law professor Fareed Hayat finished his meal at a Maryland pancake restaurant, he put his three kids in the rear-facing seats in the trunk of his Tesla. Someone believed he was kidnapping them and called the police. Officers went to Hayat’s home and questioned him and his wife on their porch. Professor Hayat denied that there was a kidnapping and tried to go inside, telling officers they could not come in. They stopped him from shutting the door, then entered the hall to handcuff him. They released him after determining that he had not kidnapped anyone. 

Professor Hayat brought a civil rights suit. The district court granted the defendants’ motions to dismiss and for summary judgment, holding that the officers were entitled to complete a Terry investigative stop by entering a house. The Fourth Circuit affirmed this decision.

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Number 32 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy, this time focusing on threats to the security of the upcoming midterm election: 

• “‘Mail early’: Election officials urge people to get ballots in pronto amid Postal Service slowdowns.” [Dion Nissenbaum, VoteBeat] One analysis of Democratic-leaning voters in four states finds them requesting mail ballots less often and returning them more quickly, both rational responses to declining reliability of delivery, whether you attribute that to budget-cutting or otherwise. [Michael Morse and Marc Meredith, NBC News] 
• Election-law expert Justin Levitt argues that Trump has almost uniformly failed in his attempts to interfere with the 2026 election and that chances are good that states and localities can withstand whatever further interference he comes up with. [NYU Law Democracy Project] 
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Recently, the proliferation of automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—led by private surveillance vendors like Flock, Axon, Motorola, and Verkada—has come under increased public scrutiny. Proponents of ALPRs—which I call “Flockers”—insist that the mass surveillance dragnet merely tracks public movements and is an indispensable crime-fighting tool. But Americans are rightly skeptical. 

And late last month, a federal jury in San Antonio shot back at the “Flockers.” 

On behalf of the Institute for Justice client, Alek Schott, 12 ordinary citizens found Bexar County liable for operating an unconstitutional mass-surveillance regime. The scheme was as predictable as it was abusive: ALPRs logged travel patterns and flagged a Houston father as suspicious. A sheriff’s deputy then manufactured a pretextual traffic violation on I‑35 to interrogate Schott, prolong his detention, and search his vehicle using a Probable Cause Creating (PCC) dog. The jury properly awarded Schott exactly what he asked for—$76, representing one dollar for each minute he was unlawfully detained.

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