It was one of those heartstring-tugging, tear-jerking, carefully curated narratives about DREAMers we're supposed to read and then respond to with sympathy.

But a story that ran in the Los Angeles Times yesterday accidentally did more to raise questions about the issue of ballot-harvesting in California than any raving right-wing warning tome could ever do.

The Times describes how California's famed ballot-harvestors, who flipped places such as Orange County blue in the last midterm, aren't actually citizens. They did it by "helping" voters fill out, and turn in, and continue to turn in, ballots from otherwise uncommitted voters until they got the result they wanted. Here's the DREAMers "helping" the voters vote the way they wanted, in action:

In California, Dreamers like Cruz phoned voters, walked precincts and protested outside Republican lawmakers’ offices, reaching people who had not been called or visited by either party. Their efforts helped boost turnout among Latinos in this year’s midterm election — 29 million nationwide were eligible to vote, according to the Pew Research Center — which is projected to surpass levels higher than in past presidential election years, political analysts said.

An analysis of data from eight states by the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA found the Latino vote grew by an estimated 96% from 2014 to 2018, compared with 37% among non-Latinos. The surge, researchers said, helped move 20 House districts held by Republicans to Democratic control in California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, New Mexico, Florida, New Jersey and New York.