Good morning, it's Sunday, Oct. 25. The Justice Department gave California counties 48 hours to pull aside mail ballots from suspected noncitizens, and the way California counts may make that impossible.

Also in today's issue: Audi picks Georgia, Iran targets Americans abroad, California's coast on notice, Obama hits the trail, Ukraine's Starlink restored.

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If you mailed in a ballot in California this month, the federal government wants some of those ballots pulled aside before they're counted. And one detail in how California handles mail ballots may make that demand impossible to meet.

Federal prosecutors sent letters Friday to at least 18 California counties, the Los Angeles County registrar said. The letters, made public Saturday, ask officials to set aside ballots from voters the Justice Department suspects aren't citizens. They also ask for those voters' Social Security numbers and ID records. Counties got 48 hours.

How many people are we talking about? Napa County got 42 names out of about 86,000 registered voters. San Bernardino County's list has 1,133. Statewide, the department says about 20,000 people on its list were mailed ballots. More than 23 million Californians got one.

Bill Essayli is the top deputy federal prosecutor in Los Angeles. He said any official who knowingly processes a noncitizen's ballot risks "legal jeopardy." A department spokeswoman said it isn't asking anyone to cancel registrations. It wants the ballots held until citizenship is checked.

Judge David Carter hasn't ruled on the lawsuit; his hearing is Tuesday. So the department went over his head to the 9th Circuit, the federal appeals court for the West. That court ordered California to respond by noon Saturday.

The case for the letters: voting by a noncitizen is a federal crime, and every illegal ballot cancels out a legal one. Holding a ballot for a few days, the department argues, costs a real voter nothing.

California's answer rests on the record. The state says the lists contain errors. Mendocino County got names of people who don't live there. The department has also lost 26 lawsuits seeking states' voter rolls and won none. Experts say noncitizen voting is rare and hasn't been shown to change any result.

Now the counting detail. Once a mail ballot's signature is checked, the ballot is pulled from its envelope and mixed with the others. Los Angeles County alone had processed about 331,000 ballots, according to court records. Those can't be pulled back.

Actual charges can look different from the warnings. In upstate New York, prosecutors charged Marva Cook, 66. She says she was adopted as a toddler and only recently learned she was born in Germany. She faces one misdemeanor over her 2022 vote. A friend of nearly 20 years says there was no intent and no deception.

In Alaska, Senate candidate Mary Peltola, Senate Democrats and voting groups asked a judge Friday night to toss a similar case. It seeks to block Alaska's Senate result if the Republican loses.

Watch the 9th Circuit. If it orders ballots held, counties will have to sort out what they still can. If it says no, the fight moves to Tuesday's hearing and to a harder question: whether any election worker gets charged. Napa's registrar says he's going ahead with the count, but his family is worried about what could happen to him.

President Trump announced Saturday that Audi will build a $4 billion plant near Macon, Georgia, to make 200,000 SUVs a year. Audi says it will create about 4,500 jobs. Construction starts next year, with production in the early 2030s. It would be Audi's first U.S. factory, since it now ships every car it sells here from Europe or Mexico. Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, said the plant would never have happened without tariffs. Those tariffs cost Audi about $1.4 billion last year, and critics say they've pushed up car prices. U.S. auto jobs have also fallen since 2025. The news came at a rally for Georgia Republicans in close races for Senate and governor.

Americans in 14 Middle East countries got updated travel advisories from the State Department on Saturday. They followed a memo from Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, which oversees the country's spy agencies. He wrote that Iranian plots to kill Americans have reached "advanced stages" in the region and beyond. The memo names no targets and doesn't say whether an attack is close. The U.S. is also cutting staff at its embassies in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, though no one is being ordered out. On Saturday, President Trump said he may have to "finish it off" unless Iran reaches an agreement. Iran replied that U.S. warships will never be allowed in the Persian Gulf, according to CBS News.

The Trump administration has suspended future federal money for California's coastal program, according to a draft review obtained by the Los Angeles Times. The funding stays frozen until the state completes more than a dozen "corrective actions." At the top of the list: meet with SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket company, and with Sable Offshore, a Texas oil company trying to restart drilling off Santa Barbara. The state must also pledge by January not to oppose offshore drilling across the board. The leverage comes from the Coastal Zone Management Act, a 1972 law that lets states review federal projects off their shores. The administration says California has shown bias against oil and rocket launches. Legal experts say no state has been treated this way before. California must respond by Nov. 16.

Former President Barack Obama held his first rallies of the midterms Saturday, in Cleveland and Detroit. In Cleveland, he campaigned for Senate candidate Sherrod Brown and governor candidate Amy Acton. He blamed the Iran war for record diesel prices and gas above $4 a gallon. Sen. Jon Husted's campaign fired back, tying Brown and Obama to higher taxes and open borders. In past races, Ohio Democrats kept national figures away, so the visit shows they think the state is in play again. In Detroit, Obama joined Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and governor candidate Jocelyn Benson. President Trump rallies in Michigan on Sunday. Saturday was also the first day of Michigan's required early in-person voting, which runs through Nov. 1.

Ukraine's military says it has regained full use of Starlink, the satellite internet service run by Elon Musk's company SpaceX. For more than a week, speed limits on the military version, called Starshield, disrupted the drones Ukraine relies on to fight Russia. Commanders reported lost drones and failed missions. CBS News reported earlier in the week that Musk himself was behind the limits. President Trump says he didn't order them. The episode shows how much of an ally's war effort can run through a single American company. Service came back just as Russia agreed to restart three-way peace talks with the U.S. and Ukraine next month.

That's how many of the 23,071 public comments on California's coastal program federal reviewers treated as "complex" enough to weigh. About 95% of all comments backed the state. About 12 of those 22 criticized the state, and the review leaned on them for its demands.

P.S. Who should decide whether a ballot gets set aside? Hit Reply — We Read Everyone.