The agency is probing issues that plagued Fulton County’s election, including unsigned tabulator tapes, identical ballot images, and deleted digital records.
After the election offices of Georgia’s most populous county were raided last month, the FBI has disclosed information indicating where its investigation is heading.
Federal laws may have been broken during the 2020 election according to the affidavit supporting the court-approved raid. Yet the breadth of the materials seized shows the FBI may be able to check the integrity of the ballots more broadly, uncovering further issues or putting speculation to bed.
President Donald Trump’s campaign challenged the Georgia election most vigorously, as he lost the state to President Joe Biden by fewer than 12,000 votes according to the official tally. The legal challenges failed. Instead, Trump was indicted based on rationale that his efforts to challenge the election results were allegedly executed with corrupt intent. The case was dismissed after he became president again in 2025.
The renewed investigation now targeting Fulton County, which covers the broader Atlanta area, uses a rationale analogous to the case against Trump. The affidavit states that if known irregularities in the election were intentional, such acts would be criminal.
On Jan. 28, agents seized some 700 boxes of election records, including physical ballots from the 2020 election. County officials have since filed a lawsuit seeking to have the materials returned.
The issues detailed in the affidavit were largely discovered years ago by concerned citizens using data obtained through freedom of information requests or litigation. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was responsible for overseeing the election and is running for governor of the state, has dismissed the issues as administrative and human errors too small to affect the election’s result.
The FBI, however, has a different perspective.
“If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law regardless of whether the failure to retain records or the deprivation of a fair tabulation of a vote was outcome determinative for any particular election or race,” reads the affidavit signed by FBI Special Agent Hugh Evans.
Raffensperger has repeatedly stressed that the 2020 votes were counted three times, including a hand recount and a machine recount.
However, many of the deficiencies outlined in the affidavit happened during these recounts.
By Petr Svab
