They’re Seizing the Ballots and Voter Rolls
An FBI raid yesterday in Fulton County is a dark harbinger of what’s to come
We have a five-alarm fire in Georgia over voting records. And it comes right on the heels of the DOJ’s efforts over the weekend to extort Minnesota out of its voter data.
On Wednesday, the FBI seized paper ballots and voter data from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. Agents carted away some 700 boxes based on a dubious search warrant that claimed, without any apparent factual support, that there was probable cause to believe the records contained evidence of a crime.
Never mind that they were already the subject of an existing civil suit by the DOJ, which had resulted in the judge sealing them. And never mind that the statute of limitations for any “election crimes” has likely already run.
The latest escalation carries grim implications for November’s midterms. The 2020 election in Georgia was ground zero for Trump’s efforts to overturn the national election results. They included Trump’s direct pressure upon Georgia officials to “find” him 11,780 votes. His obsession with having lost that state has now led to yesterday’s dramatic and unprecedented seizure of Georgia’s election materials.
Based on what we already know, we must assume that Trump, with a big assist from the DOJ, intends to use the seized materials to reassert long-disproven claims to lay the groundwork for similar assertions of fraud in this November’s midterms. And we now know the DOJ will assist Trump in seizing voting records going forward, meaning 2026 ballots and voter rolls across the nation are at high risk, too.
What we know so far about the FBI raid
On Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant at Fulton County’s elections warehouse—long the site of fantastical right-wing conspiracies over election fraud. The Bureau confirmed it was conducting “court-authorized law enforcement action,” and the warrant indicated the search was part of a criminal investigation into potential violations of federal laws covering the preservation of election records and illegal efforts to defraud voters.
Federal agents were allegedly authorized to seize physical ballots from the 2020 election, along with tabulator tapes, ballot images and voter rolls. The seized materials comprise an extraordinarily broad sweep, targeting the very building blocks of a certified presidential election.
The timing of the raid raises suspicions. The warrant was signed by a federal magistrate judge in Atlanta less than a week after Trump, speaking in Davos, Switzerland, publicly reasserted claims that the 2020 election was rigged. It also occurred on the heels of Pam Bondi’s extortion letter to Gov. Walz demanding Minnesota’s state voter data. And just last week, Kash Patel fired the FBI official, Paul W. Brown, a special agent who was in charge of the Atlanta, Georgia office, though his firing could have been for unrelated reasons.
A Reuters photographer spotted and captured Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI operation in Fulton County. It is fair to ask what Trump’s top intelligence official, who is charged with addressing foreign threats, was doing there at all.
Meanwhile, state lawmakers, including Democratic state Sen. Josh McLaurin, were barred from observing the search. As Fulton County Commissioner Mo Ivory warned, in my view correctly, this raid and seizure of voting materials are just the beginning of the electoral chaos that will unfold in 2026.
Unpacking the context of the raid
So why are Trump and his DOJ focused on Fulton County, Georgia once more, such that they have taken the extraordinary step of seizing voting records from over five years ago?
For starters, Trump personally has never gotten over his loss in Georgia in the 2020 election. Nor has he ever forgiven Republican officials in that state for confirming Biden’s victory, nor the Fulton County prosecutor’s office for bringing a criminal RICO case against him and his co-conspirators for their attempted election subversion.
A few things should be restated for the record. Trump’s loss in Georgia was confirmed by GOP state officials three times, including in a final hand count. The Trump campaign nevertheless pushed false claims of election fraud using video debunked by Georgia’s own election officials. They even targeted and endangered the lives of election workers, notably Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who later prevailed in their defamation civil suit against Rudy Giuliani.
Two months after that November 2020 election, runoff elections were held for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, both of which were won by the Democratic candidates, namely Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. This further confirmed that the entire state of Georgia was beginning to shift blue, and that Trump’s easier loss was was consistent with political trends.
Now that Trump is president again, he is determined to press criminal charges based on long-debunked claims of election fraud. Those charges ultimately may not go anywhere, given the amount of time that has passed. But that won’t stop the DOJ under Pam Bondi from drumming up allegations anyway and attempting to tarnish election officials and workers, once again, with bogus and stale allegations.
Indeed, as discussed below, the DOJ, which is now serving Trump’s will and not the people, has a strong incentive to resurrect the notion of “election fraud” and keep it front and center with the public this year.
Laying the groundwork for widespread election fraud claims
In my piece in The Big Picture earlier this week, I raised the following alarm based on the DOJ’s persistent efforts to obtain sensitive voter data from the states:
GOP leaders at the national level, such as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) or Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), could leverage false claims by the DOJ to call into question the validity of key elections and seek to delay the seating of Democrats who prevailed in their states. Meanwhile, election deniers at the state and local level could claim “fraud” while arming themselves with statements by the DOJ that there were fake voters on the rolls, even if that data is wrong or manipulated.
If this seems speculative, recall that this was the actual game plan proposed in late 2020 by a rogue DOJ official, Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to send a letter from the Justice Department to the state of Georgia advising them to call the legislature back into session to nullify the results of the election.
State and local election officials must pay close attention and prepare accordingly. The White House now has physical control over voter data and ballots from Fulton County that it can manipulate to re-litigate the 2020 election. And it would do this with one specific goal in mind: undermining public confidence over the fairness and validity of the midterm elections set for this coming November.
Through this FBI raid, the regime has now demonstrated its willingness to weaponize the DOJ not only to extort states out of their voter data, but to deploy federal agents to seize physical voting records and voter data, even if the justification for the seizure is based on repeatedly discredited claims of fraud. From this we should logically conclude that Trump and the DOJ will attempt the same in advance of, or right after, the November 2026 election.
As I warned in The Big Picture earlier this month, the seizure by federal authorities of states’ voting materials, including voting machines and ballots, presents a unique risk. And it is actually something Trump had considered doing before:
[A] recent statement by Trump hints at one other tactic that could have devastating consequences: the forced seizure of voting machines and ballots.
Trump mulled over this in 2020, and he was egged on by the likes of Ret. Gen. Michael Flynn (a traitor to our democracy if ever there was one). Cooler heads in the White House prevailed, and Trump did not order this to happen.
I do not believe he would hesitate to issue such an order after a decisive GOP loss in November that he would almost certainly claim was fraudulent. He would cite fake reports of election fraud, backed up by his captive Justice Department and some red state officials, to justify this action.
The actual physical seizure of a state’s voting materials was a Rubicon we hoped Trump would not dare cross. But here we are, and it’s only January. Sen. Jon Ossoff warned about Trump and this action yesterday in an interview with Jen Psaki of MS NOW. “This is a shot across the bow at the midterm elections,” he said. “He tried to steal power when he lost it in 2020.”
Sen. Ossoff is correct. Trump has already told us who he is: a firehose of election disinformation and false election claims. And on January 6, 2021, he showed us how far he will go when he fears losing power.
We would be wise to believe him and to prepare accordingly.
Many are asking how we prepare. The first task is to become informed about what’s happening. The second is to help raise the alarm by sharing these warnings widely to your networks. The third is to insist our leaders take the threat seriously. The fourth is to demand that local officials be prepared to resist federal takeovers or seizures. The fifth is to take training courses in peaceful civil disobedience, which MLK Jr. called “self-purification” because our natural instinct when attacked is to strike back ourselves. The sixth is to join others in the streets to demand action and help shut down the country if they try to seize power illegitimately.
Dem cities in Purple and Red states, send up the SOS flares! Marc Elias has been warning about this type of fed assaults on vote-processing centers since trump 2.0 kicked off, and tactics are now being perfected for 2026 midterms. All that is needed is a friendly magistrate — note the absence of a fed district judge signing off on the warrant — and there go all the ballots, machines, and processing software into the Ka$H Patel black hole. Philly, Atlanta, L.A., Charlotte, Tri-Cities, Phoenix, you name it, THEY will be coming for ya, book it. So, lawyer up, if you want Democratic votes to actually be counted and certified.