For more than five years, Republicans who question the results of the 2020 election demanded to inspect the original ballots from Fulton County to validate their suspicions of miscounts, missing votes and fraud.

Now, those ballots are the key piece of evidence in a federal investigation that could lead to criminal charges.

The FBI is focused on several allegations: double-counted ballots, inconsistent vote tallies and missing ballot images, according to a search warrant affidavit unsealed Tuesday.

Many conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election have been debunked, but skeptics say they have legitimate questions that need to be answered. They also say prior state investigations were incomplete.

Counting the ballots again would show whether they match the previous three counts and if any ballots are missing from the more than 650 boxes taken two weeks ago by the FBI in a raid of Fulton’s elections warehouse to an undisclosed location.

Analyzing ballot images could verify that nearly 4,000 votes were counted twice in the recount of Georgia’s election, which President Donald Trump lost by about 12,000 votes.

And the FBI’s criminal investigation could possibly settle whether Fulton’s problem with the count were human error or intentional misconduct.

“Hopefully this will answer the questions that have been lingering for five years over that election,” said Garland Favorito, a leader among conservatives who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent.

There’s no evidence that Trump won Georgia in the 2020 election.

Three vote counts in Georgia — two by machine, one by hand — showed that Joe Biden defeated Trump. However, the final, official count was 880 total presidential votes fewer than the first count in Fulton, fueling speculation of wrongdoing. In all, the heavily Democratic county recorded 523,779 votes for president, 73% of them for Biden.

Democrats say they fear the FBI’s investigation will try to turn Fulton’s errors into a crime.

An FBI agent looks outside a window from the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center in Union City on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026, as the FBI conducts a raid. (Arvin Temkar/AJC)

They say the federal inquiry perpetuates voters’ distrust in elections to satisfy Trump’s grudge after he was indicted in Fulton on allegations that he attempted to overturn his defeat, including by pressuring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” votes. Those charges were dismissed last year after the courts disqualified Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis over her romantic relationship with a special prosecutor.

“Why are we constantly revisiting the 2020 election? We’ve been here before,” said state Rep. Debra Bazemore, a Democrat from South Fulton and the chair of the county’s delegation to the General Assembly. “We have recounted and recounted and had audits, and we know what the outcome was: There was no fraud.”

Fulton Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said he was told before the FBI raid that “there were going to be arrests,” including Raffensperger, election officials and himself. He declined to identify who contacted him.

Evidence of miscounts

Fulton County’s troubles during the 2020 election are well-documented as it struggled to manage record turnout during the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented influx of absentee ballots and new voting machines.

That doesn’t necessarily mean there was fraud, as claimed by Trump.

Election monitors and state investigations have repeatedly blamed sloppiness, mismanagement and human errors for Fulton’s problems.

But the U.S. Department of Justice could bring criminal charges if investigators find evidence of intentional fraud rather than inadvertent human errors in Fulton County.

During last month’s State Election Board meeting, several Republican election critics wore black T-shirts with a picture of a noose and the words, “The corruption will continue until the tribunals begin.”

“Was this election safe and secure? Absolutely not. Was this election accurate? No one knows,” Janice Johnston, a Republican Party appointee to the State Election Board, said during the meeting.

Janice Johnston, Vice Chairman, speaks during the State Election Board’s monthly meeting at the Historic Barrow County Courthouse, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026, in Winder. This is the first meeting with the board’s newest member — Salleigh Grubbs, the first vice-chair of the Georgia Republican Party. (Hyosub Shin/AJC)

The evidence may validate allegations that some ballots were counted twice and that other ballots weren’t counted at all. Analyses by conservative data experts and a prominent statistician over the last five years found miscounts in election data.

Investigators for the secretary of state’s office acknowledged in 2024 that Fulton likely scanned more than 3,000 ballots twice during the recount.

Another analysis puts the number of repeatedly scanned ballots even higher.

Fulton double-counted 3,930 ballots during the recount, according to Phillip Davis, a conservative data expert who conducted a detailed computer review of Georgia ballot images and records. He said he confirmed the ballots were in fact counted twice — not just scanned twice — because they appear in Fulton’s “cast vote record,” which is an accounting of how each ballot was counted. The results from the cast vote record match the official results.

Even so, the double-counted ballots would not change the results. The twice-counted ballots are less than Trump’s 11,779-vote margin of defeat across Georgia.

That doesn’t mean there wasn’t fraud, Davis said.

Davis said he believes the pattern of ballots taken from their original batches and then scanned again in a different machine indicates an intentional effort to make the recount closer to the original count.

“It wasn’t about influencing the election of Biden versus Trump. It was to make the recount match the original,” said Davis, who runs the pro-Trump X account @mad_liberals. “It was humans screwing around with the system.”

Davis found the double-counted ballots by analyzing repetitive vote patterns among about 20 races on the ballot, filtered by precinct and ballot type. When series of identical ballots appeared two times in the same order, that indicates they were counted twice.

Davis said he also found 1,581 new ballots that were counted in the recount that didn’t appear in the first count, as well as what appear to be 127 test ballots that were never meant to be used in a real election.

Combined, the double-counted, new and test ballots in the recount replaced other ballots from the first count, Davis said. He found about 5,800 ballots in the first vote count that are missing from the recount.

The theory of the case

During the final vote count but before reporting results Dec. 3, 2020, Fulton County initially came up about 17,000 votes short of the number of ballots from the original count that was completed about two weeks earlier.

County election officials explained at the time that they learned they hadn’t accounted for all ballots. They said dozens of ballot batches had been inadvertently assigned identical batch numbers, which prevented those ballots from loading.

Fulton then scanned those ballots again and reported them to the secretary of state’s office, according to a 2024 state investigation report. The Fulton election board certified its results on a 3-2 vote the next day, with the board’s two Republican members voting no.

Richard Barron, who was Fulton’s election director at the time, said Fulton’s three ballot counts in different locations, including absentee ballots at State Farm Arena and a hand-count audit at Georgia World Congress Center, contributed to discrepancies between the counts.

“I would have preferred that we came out absolutely perfect,” Barron told the election board on Dec. 7, 2020. “They’re just completely different ways that you count these ballots over different periods of time, and it’s very hard to come out exactly the same.”

Election skeptics see a more sinister motive.

It will be difficult to prove that Fulton’s miscounts were intentional or fraudulent without direct evidence, said David Hancock, a Republican and a chairman of the Gwinnett County elections board who questions Fulton’s vote counts.

“We just really want to find out one way or the other,” Hancock said. “We’ve just been looking at this for a long time. Immediately after the election, when we were looking at it, they kept saying, ‘Oh, there’s nothing to see here.’”

A group of conservatives who researched Fulton’s 2020 ballots, including Favorito and Davis, produced a 263-page report last month that outlined their allegations about Fulton’s problems in the election.

The group’s leader is Kevin Moncla, who has repeatedly accused Fulton County of fraud. Moncla has said he was interviewed by investigators for the U.S. government about Fulton election records.

Davis also said he shared information with the FBI before it seized Fulton’s ballots, but he declined to discuss details of that conversation.

Based on digital ballot images and voting records, Davis claims Fulton manipulated the results to make sure they matched earlier counts. The double-counted ballots show up in groups of several ballots at a time that were initially scanned in one scanner, then combined and counted a second time in a different scanner.

Additional facts contribute to suspicions about the vote count: Fulton has acknowledged that it is missing 17,852 digital ballot images from the recount, including some from scanners where ballots were scanned twice. A state investigation report said Fulton failed to back up its ballot images, but the county still had all the physical ballots.

The missing ballot images represent about 3% of the 524,000 presidential votes counted in Fulton’s recount.

Concerns about the missing ballot images were raised three years ago by Philip Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in election auditing.

“It is unreasonable for voters to trust that their votes were counted at all, much less counted correctly,” Stark wrote in a declaration in an election security lawsuit in federal court.

While allegations of miscounts are supported by election records and previous investigations, the FBI’s search warrant also listed a separate claim of “pristine” ballots that was unsubstantiated by state election investigators in 2021.

Four Republican vote-counters had alleged they saw suspicious absentee ballots during the hand-count audit of the 2020 election, including ballots perfectly filled-in ovals and no fold lines.

But investigators for the secretary of state’s office weren’t able to find any counterfeit ballots in batches identified by the Republicans, according to a court filing in a lawsuit that sought access to Fulton’s ballots.

Now that the FBI has the original paper ballots, agents can conduct their own review to look for criminal activity.

The search warrant to seize the 2020 ballots cited two criminal statutes. One law requires the county to maintain election records for at least 22 months after a federal election, and the other prohibits knowingly tabulating fraudulent ballots.