OPINION:
On Wednesday, the FBI seized 700 boxes of Fulton County, Georgia’s 2020 presidential election records.
Last month, Fulton County officials admitted they didn’t properly verify 315,000 votes in the contentious 2020 election, where Joe Biden won the state by a slim 11,779 margin.
County attorney Ann Brumbaugh told the state’s elections board in a Dec. 9, 2025, meeting that the county didn’t properly sign tabulator tapes after the election, which was in violation of state regulations. Tabulator tapes are printed receipts from tabulation machines used to verify that the number of voters matches the number of votes.
As local Georgia station WALB News 10 noted at the time, tabulator tapes “are a key piece of the verification and certification process in every county election across the state” and “Georgia regulations state that a poll manager and two witnesses must be present for the printing, checking and signing of each tape from the machines.”
The unsigned tapes accounted for nearly every early ballot cast in the county before Election Day. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger downplayed the revelation as a clerical error, arguing it wouldn’t have changed the results of a heavily audited election.
Yet that did nothing to quell suspicions of voter fraud.
“A clerical error could be one tabulator tape not signed or one tabulator tape missing,” Garland Favorito, who leads the conservative watchdog group VoterGA told WALB News in December. “Not 148 tabulator tapes missing.”
In October, the U.S. Department of Justice subpoenaed Fulton County’s 2020 ballots, but the county ignored the request. After Ms. Brumbaugh’s admission in December, the DOJ filed a lawsuit accusing county officials of violating the Civil Rights Act by refusing to hand over the ballots.
For six years, Fulton County has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent the release of its 2020 presidential ballots and has blocked the state’s election board from conducting a thorough investigation.
In addition to failing to verify the tabulator tapes, the county has acknowledged that 10 tapes were missing. That’s short of Mr. Favorito’s accusation, but an admission nonetheless.
A 2024 investigation by the Secretary of State’s office identified thousands of potential voter discrepancies in the 2020 recount, and VoterGA has identified multiple chain-of-custody concerns. There are more than 40,000 citizen affidavits alleging voter fraud, including from 20-year election official Susan Voyles, who recalled that “pristine” ballots with a “difference in the texture of the paper” with a “different feel” and “no markings” were counted in 2020 and went 98% for Mr. Biden.
On election night in 2020, Fulton County experienced a water main break, which delayed ballot processing in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, where most election officials were sent home, save a select few.
Early after the election, Fulton County’s physical ballots were placed under a court-ordered seal in accordance with Georgia law, giving county officials an excuse to keep the records under lock and key without a specific order from a Fulton County Superior Court judge to release them.
Attempts by outside groups to inspect the ballots were dismissed by courts in 2021 and 2022 because of this technicality and others, such as lack of standing.
Yet because of the state election board’s dogged persistence, in December the court finally issued the order to unseal the ballots. Judge Robert McBurney ruled in favor of the board, allowing it to immediately obtain the 2020 ballots and related records, including scanned ballot images.
Still, Fulton County officials were obstinate. Fulton County Chairman Robb Pitts said the county would comply with the court order, but only after it could pay for the document production costs, which he estimated at about $400,000.
Enter the DOJ. On Wednesday, a search warrant was issued by Magistrate Judge Catherine M. Salinas, granting the FBI access to Fulton County’s 2020 ballots. Mr. Pitts cooperated with the warrant but told reporters the county could no longer ensure the materials’ security once they left local control.
Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett was outraged, yelling to the media that “[Fraud is] MAGA conspiracy theories!”
Sen. Jon Ossoff declared the raid a “seismic event” that “should have people across the country absolutely shook.”
Transparency is the sunlight Fulton County needs. Election fraud “conspiracy theories” can be laid to rest with facts and evidence – evidence that for six years has been denied to anyone who questioned Fulton County’s results.
So let the Justice Department’s investigation play out. The only people “shook” by the seizure of these records appear to be those who benefited from the 2020 election or helped provide cover for Fulton County’s incompetence.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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