Stand at that table with me for a second.

Anchorage, Alaska. Primary day. There is a folding table, a laminated binder, and a perfectly nice woman working the poll book the way she probably has for years.

I give her a name.

It is not my name. The name is Brian Murkowski. He is the brother of a sitting United States Senator. He does not live in Alaska. He lives in Texas.

Then I tell her the one thing that is supposed to stop all of this cold.

I tell her I do not have my ID.

She looks up at me and says:

I want you to watch this one for yourself. And then I want you to help me pay for the next one. You can chip in right here.

I asked her again anyway, because I wanted it recorded and I wanted it to be completely unmistakable to anyone who watched it later. All I have to do is fill out the question ballot, and then I can vote?

“Yes, sir.”

We titled the video “The Big Murkowski,” and you really do have to laugh a little bit at it, because the only other available option is putting your head through a wall.

The funny part ends fast. Every single thing I am about to tell you makes the thing before it worse.

Now here is the part that should stop you cold.

Senator Murkowski has spent this year fighting the SAVE Act, which her office describes as “an overly burdensome, one-size-fits-all mandate from Washington,” and the argument underneath that position has always been the same one we hear everywhere: that the hole we keep describing does not actually exist outside of our imagination.

We just showed her the hole. In her own state. Using her own brother's name.

Before anyone calls this a partisan hit job, let me say it plainly: Senator Murkowski is a Republican, and it does not matter to me even a little, because a hole in the process is a hole in the process and it does not care one bit about which party happens to walk through it.

Her office did not say they were going to fix it.

Her office said this:

Now I want to be precise with you about what we did and did not do, because you fund this operation and you deserve that kind of accounting from me.

I did not vote. I did not sign anyone's name. I never touched a ballot. I asked a question, I recorded the answer, and I left. That is what reporters do.

The response from a sitting United States Senator's office was to start talking about prosecuting me for it.

Patriot, this has become a pattern, and I want you to see it as clearly as I have come to see it over the last three weeks.

Last week the Secretary of State of Minnesota published a statement accusing my journalists of “lying, lawbreaking, and disruptions” and announced that law enforcement is reviewing them. He never named a single law we broke.

This week the office of a United States Senator is talking about prosecuting a journalist to the fullest extent of the law.

Michigan. Minnesota. Alaska. Three states in three weeks, and every single time we have gone looking, we have found the same hole sitting there in plain sight. Nobody ever rushes to close the hole. They come after the person holding the flashlight.

Let me tell you what Alaska cost.

That covered the flights to Anchorage and back, the weeks of preparation before anyone ever got on a plane, the records work, the equipment, and a team standing on the ground at dawn on primary day three thousand miles from our office. It also covered the lawyers who reviewed every frame of that footage before a single second of it went to air, because we understood exactly what was coming the moment it did.

I would spend every dollar of it again tomorrow morning without blinking. Here is my problem. We do not have another fifty thousand dollars sitting in a drawer waiting for the next state.

And there is a next one. There is always a next one.

Alaska is not special. Alaska is simply the state we happened to be standing in on Tuesday, and everything you are about to watch came out of a single morning and one honest question asked out loud at a folding table. Imagine what is sitting untouched in the other forty-nine.

In twenty-eight days, the first federal ballots for November go out. After that date the machine is running, and everything we have not found yet gets voted on anyway.

You and your family have to live under whatever comes out of those buildings, and so does mine, and that is the entire reason I keep walking into them with a camera when it would be far easier and considerably safer not to.

There is nobody else writing this check, and there never has been. It has always been you.

P.S. The video is called “The Big Murkowski,” and I hope it makes you laugh. Then I hope it makes you furious. A stranger with no ID was offered a United States Senator's brother's ballot, and the Senator's office answered by talking about prosecuting the man who filmed it. That is exactly why this cannot stop — and you are the only reason it does not have to.