Focus on Fulton

Here’s what to watchin Trump’s State of the Union address tonight at 9 p.m. ET. NTD’s special coverage starts at 7 p.m. ET. 

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 the 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.

Vote counting in Georgia starts by law on election day. Fulton County had more than half a million ballots to tabulate—almost 90 percent cast early or by mail. The result was announced several days later: Biden won the county by a 26-point margin.

One issue with the results was a lack of receipts. Each tabulator machine should be “closed” at poll closing, and the tabulator tape should be printed out to show how many ballots and votes for each candidate were counted. Then, the tape should be signed by the poll manager and two witnesses.

Yet tabulator tapes for more than 300,000 votes weren’t signed, and some were missing altogether, wrote Evans, referring to an analysis by Clay Parikh, a voting machine security expert.

Raffensperger said that was merely an administrative oversight, as the vote tallies aren’t recorded on the tape alone. They are also preserved on memory cards in the machines.

But Parikh’s analysis went deeper.

“Parikh identified one tabulator that was used to close out 15 tabulator machines from 12 different locations. In addition, the poll closing time and report printed times on several closing tabulator tapes were close enough in time that Parikh believed someone had to have manipulated the times on the reports,” Evans wrote.

“Parikh believed this showed that the memory cards were removed from the original tabulator and put in another tabulator to print out the closing tabulator tapes.”

The tabulators also have “protective counters” that track how many ballots have been scanned on them over their lifetime.

“The protective counters on at least five tabulator tapes from the same unit were identical,” Parikh found, according to Evans. “Some of the reported ballots scanned exceeded the protective counter number.”

“This indicated to Parikh that no ballots were ever scanned on these machines and that the numbers generated from those ballots were done so by placing an unencrypted memory card into the unit to generate the closing tape,” Evans wrote.

“This would have allowed an opportunity for the tabulation to be tampered with.”

The tabulators are supposed to scan each ballot, creating a digital record. But the majority of the images from the original in-person voting count have not been preserved by the county, Evans said. At the time, the county was not legally required to preserve them, but it’s not clear why they were discarded to begin with.

“This is another impediment to ruling out non-criminal explanations for the activities during the election,” the affidavit said.

On Nov. 11, 2020, Raffensperger announced a Risk Limiting Audit. Because the race was so close, it meant recounting all the ballots by hand, according to state law. The ballots were counted in batches, and the final tally for each batch was supposed to be put into an electronic auditing system called “Arlo.”

Several people who participated in the audit said they witnessed suspicious occurrences, including a batch of 110 ballots that contained 107 featuring votes for the same candidates. The bubbles on them were filled the same, and the paper felt different from other ballots, the participants said. The ballots were marked as absentee but lacked creases from being folded in a return envelope.

It’s possible that such “pristine” ballots can be created by duplication, where a damaged ballot is copied onto a new one. But those should be clearly marked as “duplicate,” and the original needs to be preserved, Evans said.

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—Petr Svab

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