An FBI raid on Wednesday afternoon drew fresh controversy to Fulton County, Ga., the site of many contentious wranglings over the narrowly divided 2020 election. FBI agents searched the Fulton County Elections Hub, fulfilling a warrant for “all records related to the 2020 election in Fulton County,” according to the local 11Alive news, which viewed the warrants. More than five years after the fact, the FBI investigation cannot undo the results of the 2020 election, but it can clarify Fulton County’s still-muddled record, closing an ugly chapter of American history and hopefully bolstering confidence in the integrity of future elections.

President Donald Trump has a fraught relationship with Fulton County, where District Attorney Fani Willis charged and booked him and his allies for their efforts to contest the 2020 election results. “Many suspect the 2020 election in Fulton County was at best lacking transparency, and at worst completely fraudulent,” explained Matt Carpenter, director of FRC Action. Willis was ultimately disqualified from the case, and the independent Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council, which took it over, decided last year to dismiss the charges against the sitting president.

However, inquiries into Fulton County’s conduct in the 2020 election remain ongoing. In a hearing before the Georgia State Election Board (SEB) last month, Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections attorney Ann Brumbaugh did not dispute the fact that the required poll workers’ signatures were missing from 134 tabulation tapes recording the county’s early voting results. These incomplete tapes accounted for 315,000 votes, or approximately 60% of the county’s total vote tally in the 2020 general election.

That astonishing revelation came about through private citizen David Cross’s public records request, funded on his own dime. By contrast, in November 2024, the SEB subpoenaed Fulton County for documents related to the 2020 election, but a year later, the county had yet to present the board with a single document. That subpoena came after the SEB officially reprimanded Fulton County in May 2024 for double-scanning at least 3,000 ballots.

On July 30, 2025, the SEB voted 3-2 to escalate its unanswered subpoena by asking for outside help. “This case is not closed. It is not dismissed,” said Board Member Janice Johnston. “To date, from the subpoena from Nov. 5, 2024, not a single document has been presented to this board.” The motion read in part:

“WHEREAS, the Board has heard complaints of potential violations of both Georgia and federal election law over the last few years and the investigations of some complaints, including SEB 2023-025, are still incomplete with respect to basic documents required by law to be maintained, despite the extensive efforts of the Board to exhaust all remedies available to it, including the lack of a response to a subpoena issued by the Board issued to Fulton County;

“NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Board calls on the assistance of the Secretary of State to assist it as fully as possible and suggests that the Secretary of State and the Attorney General seek the assistance of appropriate local authorities or federal authorities, including the Department of Justice, to take any action necessary to bring a prompt resolution of the these issues, including obtaining all necessary voting records and documents.”

In October, U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon answered this appeal, instructing Fulton County in a letter to “present for inspection in its entirety and most original form, all records in your possession responsive to the recent subpoena issued to your office by the State Election Board. … The purpose of this request is to ascertain Georgia’s compliance with various provisions of the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.”

Dhillon’s letter did not induce a satisfactory response, leading the U.S. Department of Justice to file a lawsuit last month. In late December, Fulton County Judge Robert C.I. McBurney denied the county’s request to quash the SEB subpoena. Fulton County next tried to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it “does not state a claim on which relief can be granted.” The DOJ responded by quoting the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which “provides that upon a demand from the Attorney General to any person having custody, possession, or control of any record or paper relating to any application, registration, payment or poll tax, or other act requisite to voting, such record or paper shall be produced.”

Fulton County Registrations and Elections Board Chair Sherri Allen claimed on Wednesday that the county was prepared to transfer records at a court hearing scheduled for February 9. “We thought it was going to be an orderly transfer. We were already planning to make sure. We had already said how many boxes. We had already said how much there was, and that’s what we were planning to do. We were surprised at this particular way that it happened because we were planning to turn all of those documents over anyway.”

Evidently, the DOJ got tired of Fulton County’s endless foot-dragging and viewed this agreement as too little, too late. Perhaps they also did not trust the county to search their documents thoroughly and produce every record. At the SEB’s December hearing, Johnston expressed astonishment at the records obtained by Cross, which were “woefully incomplete,” even though the county claimed it was all they had. In 2023, Fulton County relocated its election offices to a new site; the move could explain the missing records, although such an oversight would still be inexcusable.

Whatever the motivation, the DOJ took its case before a judge and obtained a search warrant. The warrant allowed the FBI to seize “all physical ballots from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County, including absentee ballots, advanced voting ballots, provisional ballots, in-person election day ballots, emergency ballots, damaged or destroyed ballots, duplicated ballots or any ballot that was used to cast a vote,” 11Alive reported, as well as all tabulator tapes, ballot images, and voter rolls.

An FBI spokesperson at the scene said the materials would be taken to the FBI’s Central Records Complex outside Winchester, Va.

Later on Wednesday, Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts bemoaned “the fact that now they [the election records] have been moved from this facility out of our control, we don’t know where they are being taken, we don’t know what’s going to happen to them. So we can no longer — and I can no longer as chair of this board — satisfy not only the citizens of Atlanta, but also the citizens of this world, that those ballots are still secure.”

If Fulton County officials indulge the illusion that American citizens (what do “citizens of this world” care?) are satisfied with the security of their 2020 election ballots, after the county all but admitted to horrendous record-keeping, then maybe that’s the real problem at the heart of this controversy. Pitts has little ground to claim the FBI will take worse care of the county’s records than it evidently did for itself.

Besides the blank signature lines on early voting tabulator tapes, Cross also discovered “identical protective counters across several different polling places, polls that were opened eight days late, polls closed at impossibly late hours, like 2:09 a.m. in the morning, and poll closing times that do not match the tapes,” he listed. “We found duplicated scanner serial numbers where the memory devices were removed from one scanner and printed on an alternate scanner.” All this amid a patchwork of records so haphazard that SEB officials could not reproduce Fulton County’s election results based on its own data.

“As the most populous county in Georgia, a swing state, Fulton County holds enormous sway over the outcome of statewide elections,” Carpenter told TWS. “While Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes were not necessarily determinative of a Biden victory in 2020, they were undoubtedly an exclamation mark on election night as Georgia was the only southern state — except for bluish-purple Virginia — to go for Biden. Not only that, but Georgia had two Senate races that year as well, both of which went to the Democrats.”

“With the growth of Atlanta in recent years, many suspect the state is trending from its long-held status as a reliably conservative state into a true swing state,” Carpenter continued. “Getting to the bottom of the 2020 election results will go a long way to finding out once and for all just how purple Georgia is, and whether or not significant fraud occurred the night of the 2020 election in Fulton County.”