LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyAs US voters look to the November midterms, the Trump administration is obsessed with looking back to past elections, seizing ballots cast years ago in several states in search, it claims, of fraud or other malfeasance. But experts believe the goal may be more varied.
The seizures began in January when FBI agents armed with a warrant raided an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and grabbed 600 boxes of ballots from 2020. This was followed in March by the Department of Justice obtaining ballot images from 2020 in Maricopa County, Arizona, and—citing claims about supposed fraud in 2020—demanding ballots from the 2024 election in Wayne County, Michigan.
These federal seizures have even trickled down to the local level. In March, a Republican sheriff in California obtained a warrant to seize about 650,000 ballots from a statewide redistricting election held in November. He announced, with no evident authority to do so, that his deputies would conduct a recount.
Election experts fear the trend could grow, creating widespread chaos after the midterms, if courts fail to scrutinize what appear to be politically motivated requests from groups intent on undermining election outcomes they don’t like.
“It’s really important for the public, for grand juries, for judges to not allow these actions … to become some kind of precedent,” says Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice. “This is not, and shouldn’t be, a rubber-stamp issue.”
It’s difficult to know for certain what parties seizing ballots aim to achieve. The DOJ could be fishing for evidence of fraud to legitimize President Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Or it could be sending a message to voters and election officials that the federal government controls elections, despite the Constitution saying otherwise. The seizures may also be trial balloons to see how courts, election officials, and the public react. If the response is weak, it could embolden the administration to seize ballots after the midterms.
“There is understandable concern that this is a dry run for going after ballot seizures in an ongoing election,” says Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at Campaign Legal Center. “Obviously the concern is you now have highly placed election denialists within the federal government who have the ability to use the enormous power the federal government has, and to abuse it.”
A Justice Department spokesperson said that the department “is committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent.”
The White House provided only a lengthy statement about the right of the federal government to obtain voter-registration data, which included a push for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act.
It’s no surprise that the seizures have focused on three critical battleground states that have been in the sights of Trump and election deniers since 2020. The midterm results in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan aren’t just important because they could affect which party controls Congress, though: These three states are among more than three dozen with races for state offices responsible for overseeing elections or interpreting election laws. Noted “election deniers” are running in some of the races.
Of all the seizures, the Fulton County case has received the most attention. In 2020, Joe Biden barely won Georgia by 0.23 percent, after which Trump phoned Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger—a Trump supporter at the time—to pressure him to “find” more votes across the state to overturn Biden’s win. Raffensperger refused, and he and other Georgia officials have since been in the sights of Trump and the election denial movement. Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold and the state’s most populous county, has been a particular focus.
On January 28, FBI agents armed with a warrant raided a Fulton County election office and seized paper ballots from the 2020 election, as well as digital scans of the ballots, receipts from tabulator machines, and voter rolls. The government claims the material is part of a criminal investigation into how county officials and workers handled the 2020 election, and has since demanded the names, home addresses, and other personal information for election staff, poll workers, and volunteers.
The unprecedented seizure raised a number of red flags. It was initiated by Kurt Olsen, a lawyer and White House adviser who has long assisted Trump with trying to overturn the 2020 election. The prosecutor behind the application for the warrant is a US attorney in Missouri, not one in Georgia. And Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, accompanied the FBI on the raid, even though she has no authority over domestic law enforcement issues or elections, aside from investigating possible foreign interference in elections.
When a court challenge unsealed the affidavit to obtain the warrant, there was no foreign interference mentioned, and the probable cause appeared to come from a problematic report produced by an election conspiracy group. The group claims to have evidence of missing records, unauthorized access to election systems, and ballot counting “without proper verification.”
The nonpartisan nonprofit States United Democracy Center says, however, that the group’s report contains “no legitimate conclusions” about the election, “suffers from extensive analytical and factual flaws,” and that nearly all of the claims were addressed and debunked in previous audits and recounts. The county has since accused the DOJ of misleading the magistrate judge who approved the warrant. Officials say the DOJ provided the court with a “gross mischaracterization of the facts” and didn’t tell the court that the claims had been previously investigated and dismissed. The DOJ also did not make it clear to the judge that the ballots were part of ongoing litigation.
Normally, ballots from a six-year-old election would already have been destroyed. Federal law requires ballots from federal elections be kept 22 months after polls close; Georgia state law requires retention for 24 months. But the ballots were part of multiple ongoing civil actions, including one filed previously by the DOJ. Rather than wait for its own civil litigation to play out, the DOJ quickly launched a criminal case in January that allowed the FBI to seize the ballots immediately. County officials have accused the DOJ of using the criminal case as a pretext to bypass all of the civil litigation.
Ramachandran and Baldwin say the seizure of original ballots, instead of copies, is irregular. Parties seeking ballots post-election are usually given access to them in a secure county facility, or they receive copies so the integrity and chain of custody of the originals is maintained.
“The government policy is to use the least intrusive measure possible, and so these are certainly not the least intrusive measures that they’re doing in Georgia,” says Baldwin.
Baldwin notes that even the Civil Rights Act, which gives the federal government authority to ask for voter records from states, doesn’t say federal authorities can seize ballots.
“It says you can inspect [ballots] and ask for copies,” Baldwin says. “So it is impossible for me to … imagine why, in any kind of legitimate investigation, why the federal government should need to seize original ballots.”
Baldwin says the red flags around the warrant and how the DOJ obtained it should be a warning to courts and judges to be less trusting of DOJ claims in the future.
“There’s long been this presumption … that when the Department of Justice undertakes all these activities, that things are vetted,” they say. “Unfortunately we’re in a situation now where everyone should be on notice that that summation doesn’t hold anymore.”
Questions remain about what the DOJ hopes to gain from seizing six-year-old ballots. Some fear the aim is to seed mistrust in the 2020 election to set the stage for voter fraud claims after this year’s midterms, as well as a precedent for seizing ballots.
But another possible explanation lies in a Georgia law passed in 2021. The law gives the Republican-dominated state election board authority to appoint an independent review of the county election board and usurp that board if there is evidence of incompetence. This would potentially put the state board in a position to disqualify some voters and ballots that it deems illegitimate in future elections. The law also lets the state legislature, currently Republican-dominated, appoint members to the state board, ensuring that the board supports the legislature’s wishes. The legislature already removed the secretary of state as head of the state election board, which diminished Raffensperger’s power.
In March, the FBI issued a grand jury subpoena to the Arizona State Senate for records related to the 2020 presidential election. The order went to the Senate because the 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County in the election were destroyed after two years, in compliance with state law. But the Senate still had digital scans of the ballots that were used in a controversial 2021 audit performed by the since-shuttered cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, which was widely criticized for security failures and its lack of rigor.
The FBI seized more than three dozen hard drives and servers from Maricopa, containing the digital ballot images and other materials. Experts say that if the DOJ is looking for fraud, the digital ballot images won’t provide sufficient integrity, since Cyber Ninjas or anyone may have altered them in the intervening five years.
This isn’t the first time the Justice Department has seized ballots in Maricopa County. In 2006, a local US attorney seized ballots from a 2004 Republican primary more than a year after a far-right Republican beat an establishment-Republican candidate by just four votes for a seat in Arizona’s state house of representatives. A recount overturned the results but also unearthed 489 additional votes that hadn’t been in the initial count. The state senate began an investigation, but before an expert it hired could examine the ballots, the local US Attorney announced he would do his own investigation and had the FBI seize them. Ten months later, the US Attorney’s office reported it found no evidence of fraud and reasoned that the disparity in the number of votes in the original and recount tallies was likely due to a problem with a scanner used in the initial count that wasn’t used in the recount. The US Attorney’s office, however, didn’t provide details about how it conducted its investigation or arrived at its conclusion.
In April, the Justice Department sent a letter to Wayne County, Michigan—home to Detroit—demanding all 865,000 ballots cast and other election material from the 2024 election. The department, however, cited a handful of election fraud cases and allegations related to the county’s 2020 election, not the 2024 election, in its seizure demand. Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel and others denounced the demand, saying none of the cited cases were from the 2024 election, and the 2020 cases that were cited had already been prosecuted, discredited, or dismissed.
“Using these prosecutions and recycling debunked 2020 election conspiracy theories as justification to demand copies of the ballots of Michigan residents is a clear attempt to bully clerks and spread fear, even after Donald Trump won Michigan in 2024,” Nessel said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the secretary of state said they can’t speculate on what the DOJ’s motive might be in demanding the ballots, but said in a statement: “The president has hurled claims about Detroit for five and a half years that repeatedly have been found to be untrue by courts and independent auditors.”
In March, county sheriff Chad Bianco, who is running for California governor this year and is neck-to-neck with another Republican in the race, obtained warrants to seize 600,000 ballots from a statewide special election held last November. The election was focused on a single proposition, a redistricting measure aimed at creating five new congressional districts in the state—all dominated by Democratic voters. The measure passed with 64 percent of voters in the state approving it.
After the Justice Department seized ballots in Georgia in January, Bianco moved to seize ballots in Riverside County and launched an unauthorized recount involving sheriff’s deputies untrained in ballot-counting or election administration. Bianco called it a “fact-finding mission” intended “just as much to prove the election is accurate as it is to show otherwise.”
After a court challenge unsealed warrant requests in the case, it emerged that Bianco had obtained them based on faulty assertions from a citizens group who cited a discrepancy in the numbers of ballots cast and counted. The county had reported 657,000 ballots cast, but logs that election workers filled out by hand showed about 611,000 cast. The Registrar of Voters had previously told the county’s board of supervisors that the citizens group misinterpreted the handwritten logs, which only tracked a subset of ballots cast, but Bianco used the disputed claim anyway to obtain warrants.
California’s attorney general ordered Bianco to halt the recount, saying he had gone “rogue” and was abusing authority. The state supreme court ordered a stay on the recount pending further review by the court. Experts have called the seizure “extremely concerning.”
Baldwin calls the Riverside situation “lawless and troubling.”
“The idea that a local official can just say ‘I’m going to recount the ballots,’ even though there is nothing in state law that accounts for that, shows the weakening of norms around that process,” says Baldwin.
The question experts are now contemplating is what will happen in the future if federal, state, or local officials try to seize ballots during or immediately after vote-counting finishes in a jurisdiction and before a state certifies the results. If the federal government were to try to seize ballots at that point, it would be “extraordinary,” and there could be only one explanation: “It would just be for purposes of interference and sabotage,” Baldwin says. “There is just no legitimate rationale for interfering while there is an active vote tally.”
Baldwin goes on to note: “I do think that would be something extraordinary that would gather real public outrage and that the courts can and will put a stop to.”
Chris Edelson, election law expert and lecturer in the political science department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says that seizing ballots at that point would require “significant evidence” of fraud or malfeasance, and courts would have to approve it.
Could voters count on judges applying strict standards?
Baldwin says that in general, trial courts and federal district courts have been doing “really admirable work in insisting on the rule of law” when Trump and his supporters have tried to overturn election results. But Edelson isn’t so certain that judges will continue to hold strong.
“You can’t count on anything,” he says. “Trump has shown that normal rules don’t always matter if you get people to go along with you … I expect most judges will not go along, but it only takes one, or some.”
