FBI raid of voting records meant to find long-elusive evidence of ballot misconduct in 2020 count

When the FBI seized voting records from Fulton County, Georgia, last month it was looking for evidence of “defects” in the vote count from the 2020 election, according to an affidavit unsealed Tuesday that backed up the search warrant.

The warrant allowed the FBI to seize a wide range of documents, including the county’s voter rolls, ballots cast and tabulation records showing how the ballots were counted.

Mr. Trump lost Georgia in the 2020 vote by about 12,000 votes. He has alleged fraud affected his tally, though that claim has met with little success in previous court challenges.

Still, his worries have persisted, and the Jan. 28 raid on the county election office indicates his administration is pursuing the matter.

Fulton County has previously acknowledged lacking precinct worker signatures on some tabulation records.

The affidavit says the county admitted to other irregularities, including not maintaining some scanned images of cast ballots and overcounting some ballots.

“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,” the affidavit said.

The search enraged congressional Democrats and liberal voting groups, and the details of the warrant have only fueled those complaints.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s presence at the search raised more questions.

“When the nation’s top intelligence official inserts herself into a matter with no connection to a foreign threat, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the objective was political – namely, getting back into Donald Trump’s good graces – and that her presence was meant to lay the groundwork for baseless claims of foreign interference,” said Sen. Mark Warner, Virginia Democrat and vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee.

Liberal activists said the affidavit build on discredited claims of Kurt Olsen, a Trump campaign lawyer who news reports said has now been asked to review the 2020 election.

“The Fulton County election offices warrant appears to rely largely on debunked conspiracy theories dating back to the 2020 elections. That raises serious questions about probable cause for the investigation and why such an intrusive action is being taken more than five years after the election was certified,” said Michael McNulty, policy director at Issue One.

He said the Fulton investigation is the latest in a string of worrying efforts by the Trump administration.

The Justice Department has sued 24 states to pry loose their voter registration records — and has suffered multiple defeats in court.

Mr. Trump’s claims of a “stolen” 2020 election led to the mob incursion on the Capitol on Jan. 6, disrupting the Electoral College count that confirmed former President Biden’s victory.

Georgia was one of a number of states that flipped from 2016 to 2020, and even if Mr. Trump had won its electoral votes he would still have been shy of the total needed to win the presidency.

But the state has struck a nerve for the president.

He lost Fulton County by more than 240,000 votes, out of roughly 525,000 cast.

Mr. Trump’s backers have questioned some 315,000 early votes cast in that year’s election for which the county admits it didn’t record required poll-worker signatures.

The president’s opponents say the issue was a record-keeping snafu, not evidence of fraud.