While the nation’s attention was focused on the ICE invasion of Minneapolis, another part of Trump’s authoritarian state apparatus was in action more than a thousand miles away. On Wednesday 28 January, the FBI carried out a stunning raid at the central election facility in Fulton county, Georgia.
Its purpose: to seize ballots cast in the 2020 election. Such an action is unprecedented.
In another unprecedented development, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was on the scene when the FBI carried out its raid. The New York Times quotes a “senior administration official” who explained her presence by saying Gabbard “has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure”.
The deployment of such firepower shows the lengths to which the president is willing to go to press his claim that the 2020 election was rigged and to lay the groundwork for the seizure of ballots in 2026. The seizure of ballots in Georgia is like a shot across the bow.
It should prompt concerted planning by state attorneys general and secretaries of state to resist federal interference in November. We need more people like Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, who said after the FBI raid: “In Maine, we have strict chain of custody controls over our ballots … There are only two people that have the key. One of them is me. And he is not getting our ballots. He’s not getting our voter rolls.”
But don’t be fooled, the president won’t give up on his quest to find evidence that officials in Fulton county destroyed or altered ballots.
That is why in addition to the physical ballots the FBI sought “tabulator tapes for every voting machine used in Fulton County … ballot images produced during the original ballot count beginning on November 3, 2020, the recount, and any other ballot images that were created from ballot scanning from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County”. They also sought voter rolls from the 2020 general election including records pertaining to “absentee” and “early voting” including “to whom an absentee ballot was issued, from whom an absentee ballot was received, or who participated in advanced voting or election day voting”.
All told, the FBI took more than 700 boxes of election records.
Wednesday’s search and seizure is the latest step in a long-running battle.
In November 2024, the Republican-dominated state election board subpoenaed 2020 election materials from Fulton county. When the county went to court to try to quash the subpoena, the state election board sought help from Pam Bondi “to effect compliance with voting transparency”, according to a justice department lawsuit.
In December, the justice department sued on the grounds that “the county is in violation of … the Civil Rights Act”. The suit asserted that the attorney general had “sweeping power” to obtain election records.
All of this makes sense when we recall the president’s obsession with Georgia’s 2020 election results. Among other things, he claimed in a call with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, that about 5,000 dead people had ballots cast in their names and that “thousands and thousands who went to the voting place on November 3 were told they couldn’t vote, were told they couldn’t vote because a ballot had been put on their name.”
The president also alleged that “at least 18,000 ... voters” were connected to a Fulton county election worker who was a supposed “scammer”. “[The 18,000 ballots] weren’t in an official voter box, but they were in what looked to be suitcases or trunks, suitcases but they weren’t in voter boxes.”
Each of those claims was proven false, and the Fulton county ballots were subject to multiple recounts.
Nonetheless, in a recent interview with the New York Times, the president expressed regret about “not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election”. He “doubted whether the Guard was ‘sophisticated enough’ to carry out the order effectively”.
Enter the FBI.
After the FBI raid, the president reposted the following to his Truth Social account: “President Trump’s legal team exposing the 2020 election fraud at the Georgia State Farm Arena … running the same stacks of ballots over, and over, and over, all through the night until Biden was ahead, stealing the election from President Trump. This is exactly why the FBI raided the election center today … This is only the beginning. prosecutions are coming.”
The president added, “TRUMP WON BIG. Crooked election.”
It seems that in the world he wants to create, there is no future until the injuries (whether real or imagined) done to him are made right. Just last week, during his speech to the World Economic Forum, Trump reiterated that 2020 “was a rigged election”. And he added: “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”
And in the Trump administration, what the president wants, the president gets. That’s why the FBI seized what it did in Fulton county.
In the name of election integrity, the administration seems bent on ensuring that elections can be free and fair only if they turn out the way the president wants. That’s why it would be a mistake to write off the raid as just a rehashing of the past.
It sends a powerful signal to election officials everywhere that they will be under scrutiny, as they never have been before, by an administration that insists that the federal government will take a leading role in policing elections and in making sure that they are carried out to its satisfaction. The FBI raid is, in the world of elections, what the ICE invasion of Minneapolis is in the world of law enforcement.
An effort at intimidation.
As one of Fulton county’s election officials put it: “All of this is about disrupting the elections in November. All this is about Fulton – the most important County in Georgia and maybe even the nation … This is all a distraction to make people fearful to go to the polls in November.”
It should also serve as a wake-up call, a preview of what is in store in several months. The FBI, the justice department, and the intelligence community are all coming to places like Fulton county, places where, left to their own devices, voters might not do what the president wants them to do.
Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty
