What the raid on Fulton’s election warehouse did (and did not) accomplish
Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts received a startling phone call in his office on Jan. 28. FBI agents were at the county’s elections hub. He knew it was about the 2020 election but wondered what possibly could be going on.
Pitts reached the county attorney, and they rushed to the warehouse. For hours, officials, journalists and onlookers stood outside as the culmination of a yearslong campaign to prove wrongdoing in Fulton’s 2020 election reached a new crescendo. Inside the warehouse, FBI agents loaded trucks with more than 650 boxes of ballots and election records.
The election had been settled long ago. Multiple recounts had shown that President Donald Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden in Georgia by nearly 12,000 votes. No investigation had found evidence of wrongdoing in Fulton or that Trump won. Still, Trump falsely insists the election was stolen.
When Pitts started hearing murmurs that then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was at the warehouse in Fairburn, his understanding of the ballot seizure came into focus.
“This has to be a lot bigger than just reviewing boxes of election materials for 2020,” he recalled in a recent interview.
Conservatives, who have long cast doubts on the county’s 2020 election, embraced the raid and hurried to the scene themselves. Republican State Election Board members Janice Johnston and Salleigh Grubbs joined Steve Bannon’s conservative “War Room” podcast from a car outside the warehouse.
“I’ve worked really hard to see this day coming, and it’s surreal — it’s very surreal,” said Grubbs.
So far, the raid has failed to deliver new revelations or the indictments some Trump supporters had hoped for. But it demonstrated how far the administration would go to settle the president’s 2020 grievances and breathe new life into doubts about elections ahead of high-stakes elections in November.
Now, some Democrats and election officials are concerned that it could be an omen of what’s on the horizon for future seizures in 2026 or even 2028.
Last month, the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit in a federal district court in Washington, D.C., over records it sought from the government for any planned seizures of election records or voting machines.
“To ensure that the American people obtain timely knowledge of potential threats to free and fair elections and to enable the DNC to take appropriate action to ensure voting rights are protected, the DNC now seeks this Court’s aid to enforce FOIA requirements,” attorneys for the DNC wrote.
The raid also prompted legal experts to game out the prospect of future ballot seizures.
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, said he worries about the prospect of ballot seizures or the president pressuring election officials to delay certification to raise spurious claims of fraud in close elections.
Derek Clinger, of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School, wrote in a report that judges across the country should apply more scrutiny to warrants seeking election materials.
He also laid out how state attorneys general can offer advisory legal opinions or election administrators can offer guidance clarifying the legal framework for law enforcement’s access to election records.
“I don’t want to lose sight of how unprecedented and unusual this all is, but I do think the fact that these episodes have occurred earlier in the year has brought the issue to everyone’s attention and given people the motivation but also the time to prepare for it going into November,” Clinger told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Ballot seizures during an election would inject new challenges for officials in a process that leaves little room for error, threatening to disrupt ballot counting and postelection processes.
Since the Fulton raid, federal investigators expanded inquiries to other key swing states Trump lost in 2020. The FBI has obtained images of ballots from the 2020 vote in Maricopa County, Arizona. Agents have interviewed current and former election officials in Milwaukee about the 2020 election, and the DOJ has sought 2024 ballots in Detroit.
While federal authorities haven’t obtained expansive search warrants like the one in Fulton, a comparable episode unfolded weeks later in Riverside County, California.
The county sheriff, Chad Bianco, then a Republican candidate for governor, seized more than 650,000 ballots from a 2025 election based on unsubstantiated claims of election irregularities. A fight over the legality of Bianco’s ballot seizure is playing out before the California Supreme Court.
‘No one’s found a thing’
The Fulton raid was unusual in many ways. The investigation was prompted by Kurt Olsen, then appointed as the director of election security and integrity. Olsen, a lawyer, tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. The affidavit relied on previously investigated claims that have found errors but no fraud. And the laws cited by the Justice Department would likely fall outside the statute of limitations to prosecute even if they revealed evidence of a crime, a federal judge and legal experts have noted.
In Fulton, the Justice Department is looking into whether county officials failed to retain ballot images; whether ballots were scanned and counted multiple times; and whether there were bogus absentee ballots.
Few elections in American history have been examined as much as Georgia’s in 2020, subject to multiple vote counts, a barrage of lawsuits and a yearslong election interference probe. Gabriel Sterling, the secretary’s office’s director of special projects, was blunt about the investigation.
“This is the most poked, prodded, reviewed election in American and world history and no one’s found a thing,” he said. “You know why? Because nothing is there to find.”
In April, the DOJ issued a grand jury subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of 2020 paid and volunteer election workers in Fulton. U.S. District Court Judge Billy Ray blocked the demand, which he said threatens to chill participation in future elections.
Seven months after the raid, the Justice Department has released no evidence of wrongdoing in Fulton, even after devoting significant resources to the investigation.
Some observers view the raid as an attempt to cast doubt upon future elections, but election skeptics who have supported the raid say they still have unanswered questions about what happened in 2020 and that previous investigations were inadequate.
Top of mind for Grubbs is whether Fulton double-counted ballots. State officials found that the county scanned more than 3,000 ballots twice during a machine recount but could not determine whether such ballots were double-counted.
One conservative researcher, Philip Davis, has spoken to federal authorities and says that those twice-scanned ballots were also double-counted.
Trump narrowed his gap with Biden in the recount by hundreds of votes. It didn’t change the outcome of his loss.
Grubbs told the AJC she hopes “the truth comes out and that if there were any processes that were not done correctly, that corrections are made to be sure that we have fair and auditable elections.”
It’s not clear when or if any new evidence about what happened will be revealed or whether Grubbs and others will ever be content with what happened in 2020. Any evidence that is presented is certain to be viewed with skeptical eyes.
