Judge Gives Feds Until Noon Friday To Confess Which States They Phished For Fraud

In what legal scholars are classifying as a gentle ultimatum to an unruly toddler, a federal judge has mandated that the administration confess precisely how many state election boards received its official, stationery-clad demands to manifest fraud immediately. Citing a profound national allergy to vague bureaucratic extortion, the bench gave officials until noon Friday to produce the receipts from an aggressive postal fishing expedition aimed at finding dead voters, phantom ballots, or at least one county clerk willing to hallucinate a statistical anomaly on command. The order has triggered immediate panic inside the Justice Department, where career apparatchiks must now comb through their 'Sent' folders to tally every menacing missive fired off into the sovereign ether. Attorneys for the government argued that categorizing the correspondence by lunchtime was unreasonable, largely because several crucial directives had been scribbled on cocktail napkins and filed under 'Strictly Confidential / Please Burn After Skimming.' Unless granted an extension, officials will be forced to present a comprehensive ledger detailing every municipality they begged to invent a crime before the weekend begins.