The Fulton County raid is part of Trump's total war on voting
And it's disturbing that a magistrate judge signed off on it.
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While it may seem like the entire federal government is currently focused on violently attacking immigrants and anyone who supports them, that’s simply not true. A significant part of the federal government is also focused on destroying free and fair elections.
Now, that’s multitasking.
It’s honestly difficult to unpack all the ways in which the administration is undermining the safety, security, and constitutionality of elections in genuinely unprecedented ways. This isn’t intended to minimize the decades-long Republican efforts to dismantle the Voting Rights Act — looking at you, John Roberts. Nor should we overlook that conservatives have long touted nonexistent voter fraud as a way to suppress votes in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions. But the efforts of the Trump administration go far beyond that, into the dumbest and most dangerous places.
The FBI’s recent raid on the elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, where federal agents descended with a search warrant alleging that 2020 ballots and other election material were evidence of a crime, is one of those things where every way you can describe it sounds overwrought. It’s unprecedented. It’s unbelievable. It’s catastrophic. The federal government seized the county’s 2020 ballots, ballot images, voter rolls, and tabulator tapes as part of President Trump’s ongoing attempt to prove he won the 2020 election.
The DOJ tried to subpoena Fulton County’s 2020 election records last fall, then filed a civil suit in December when the county didn’t respond to the subpoena. But hey, why go the civil route when you can gin up long-debunked allegations of criminal conduct to get a search warrant?
And speaking of that warrant — it’s genuinely distressing that a magistrate judge signed off on this.
Restart the steal
Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas is no right-wing election denier or newbie. She’s been in the job for 10 years and has a background as a public defender and in legal aid. So, this can’t be automatically chalked up to malice or incompetence. However, the affidavit supporting the search warrant is fatally flawed in three glaringly obvious ways.
First, it relies on long-debunked allegations that have already been thoroughly investigated. These are things like missing ballot images or claims of duplicate ballots, evidence only of regrettable, yet routine, human error, not some nefarious plot to deny Trump the election. Beyond the fact that there were multiple audits and investigations, all of which determined that any errors did not affect the accuracy of the election results, there’s also the whole thing where Fulton County’s 2020 ballots were counted, then recounted, then recounted again, with the same results.
Fun fact: the brain geniuses in Kash Patel’s shop did not reach out to Georgia state investigators to get copies or any information about those past investigations, because they wouldn’t want any facts to get in the way of their conspiracy theories.
Next, election deniers provided much of the “evidence” for the debunked claims in the affidavit. In a normal world, the FBI wouldn’t lean on weirdo conspiracy theorists as support for an unprecedented search warrant that is breathtaking in scope, but we no longer live in a normal world. Instead, what we have is an affidavit explaining that the criminal investigation originated from a referral by Kurt Olsen, the “Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.”
Who is Kurt Olsen, you might ask? He’s a Stop the Steal lawyer who was in close contact with Trump on January 6. He served as a special counsel for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton when Paxton filed his unhinged lawsuit trying to invalidate election results in four states Trump lost. And, just so you understand Olsen is a well-rounded election denier, not just a garden variety Trump 2020 election denier, he was sanctioned and fined for repeating “unequivocally false” election claims in court when representing Kari Lake in her failed bid for Arizona governor in 2022. In a normal world, Olsen would be unemployable after his democracy-destroying antics, but instead he is a high-level government employee who has unfettered access to sensitive intelligence data in his quest to prove Trump won in 2020. Great.
Finally — and this is a biggie — the affidavit does not actually allege a crime took place. Yes, it mentions criminal statutes that allegedly apply, but that’s not the same thing. Instead, it says that “if these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law” and “if these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, the election records” seized are evidence of violations of Title 52 U.S.C. §§ 20511 and 20701.
Section 20511(2), quoted in the affidavit, makes it a felony to “knowingly and willingly” deprive a state’s residents of a fair and impartial election by procuring, casting, or tabulating ballots “that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent.”
Section 20701 makes it a misdemeanor if someone “willfully fails” to comply with the requirement to preserve election records for 22 months following an election.
You’ll see that both of these statutes require an intentional, knowing act. Inadvertent errors don’t count as violations of the law. Even carelessness wouldn’t count. Put another way, an intentional act is a required element of both crimes.
Search warrants require a showing of probable cause that a crime has been committed, but there are no allegations in the affidavit that any specific person did anything intentionally. The government isn’t required, when seeking a warrant, to prove there was an intentional act, but it is required to provide sufficient allegations to show there is probable cause to believe it was intentional.
Oh wait, there’s a fourth problem with the affidavit, which is that the statute of limitations for the alleged crimes has already expired, and there is nothing in the affidavit that would explain why that is not the case.
Besides having the most irregular, BS affidavit to justify this search, there’s the genuinely illegal presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The agencies Gabbard oversees are restricted from conducting intelligence activities within the United States. Having your spy chief show up for a domestic law enforcement matter — particularly when the affidavit supporting the search did not allege any foreign interference in elections — is not great. Having your spy chief facilitate a call between the president and the FBI agents performing the search so he could praise them for their work? Also not great. But hey, at least the whole thing allowed Gabbard to get back into Trump’s good graces, which is clearly all she cares about.
If seizing Fulton County’s election records was the only thing the administration did, that would be bad enough, particularly because the seizure of the records was incredibly sloppy. Agents did not provide an inventory of what they took, forcing local officials to just ballpark how many boxes were seized. Additionally, removing ballots from the election center and opening any sealed materials breaks the chain of custody.
For this administration, though, these are features, not bugs.
“We have states that I won that show I didn’t win”
The administration wants to undermine confidence in elections. More specifically, the administration wants to undermine confidence in the ability of states to conduct elections so that Trump can demand we “nationalize” the vote.
It isn’t really clear what the scope of “nationalizing” the vote means, but Trump let everyone know that at the very least, it should include allowing Republican officials to “take over” voting: “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt later tried to clean up these remarks, saying that what Trump was really talking about was the SAVE Act, the voter suppression measure currently hurtling through Congress, having passed the House on Wednesday.
But even the New York Times couldn’t carry water for Trump on this one, noting that Trump never actually referenced the SAVE Act and that SAVE doesn’t federalize elections.
Well, not technically. But SAVE is an attempt to impose Trump’s will nationwide, undercutting the independence of states to set their own election rules. Also, SAVE is terrible on its face. It mandates that voters provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. No, your driver’s license isn’t proof. Not even your REAL ID. Passports or birth certificates are pretty much it. And if you happen to have changed your name when you got married, which may include as many as 69 million women, your birth certificate won’t suffice.
States would also be required to conduct monthly purges of voter rolls by checking against the Department of Homeland Security’s Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements database. Sure, that’s not a database remotely related to voting and sure, creating a centralized database actually makes elections more, not less, vulnerable to attack, and sure, states that have already decided to voluntarily check their rolls against the SAVE database have ended up disenfranchising citizens. But all of this is a small price to pay to combat a nonexistent problem.
Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, and occurs in such minuscule amounts that it cannot possibly affect election outcomes. The Brookings Institution reviewed the voter fraud database maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a staunch proponent of the voter fraud myth. For example, in Arizona, Heritage found 36 cases of fraud across 25 years, out of over 42 million ballots cast. That’s a whopping .0000845%.
Voting by noncitizens is also very rare, but red states nonetheless keep trying to remove alleged noncitizens from their voting rolls en masse, only to learn that whoops, they are actually removing citizens.
The SAVE Act is not expected to pass the Senate, but in some ways, it doesn’t really need to. It has already served the same purpose as the Fulton County raid: undermining confidence in elections by amplifying baseless suspicions and lies about fraud.
Finally, there is the administration’s demand that all states hand over their complete voter rolls. Federal courts in Michigan, Oregon, and California have dismissed lawsuits filed by the DOJ against states that did not agree to break their own laws by willy-nilly handing over unredacted voter data, but at least 10 states have voluntarily turned theirs over. Thus far, Texas and Alaska have also signed an agreement that lets the DOJ analyze their voter rolls and order them to remove anyone the DOJ decides should be removed within 45 days.
It’s a backdoor way of giving the executive branch power over elections, despite the fact that the Constitution leaves elections to the states, with only Congress retaining the power to alter regulations. Let’s be frank: it’s also a way for the administration to hoover up ever more data in its quest to create a nationwide surveillance database it can use to target immigrants and those willing to protest on their behalf.
The Internal Revenue Service has already improperly shared confidential taxpayer data for thousands of immigrants with DHS. The Department of Government Efficiency already shared social security data on an insecure third-party server, with one DOGE employee stationed within the Social Security Administration signing an agreement with an unidentified group to “find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain states.”
Nothing that is being done here is at all about ensuring elections are free of fraud, because they already are. State officials know how to run elections and they know how to ensure that only eligible voters get to cast ballots. Trump lost the 2020 election, and it wasn’t because of immigrants or voting machines or Hugo Chavez or Democrats, but since he will never let it go, we’re all stuck here too.
That’s it for today
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Lisa Needham writes: "Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas is no right-wing election denier or newbie. She’s been in the job for 10 years and has a background as a public defender and in legal aid. So, this can’t be automatically chalked up to malice or incompetence. However, the affidavit supporting the search warrant is fatally flawed in three glaringly obvious ways."
So WHY did the Magistrate Judge agree to issue a warrant? That's the question I would like to have answered, as I have been wondering from the start what judge would have signed off on this travesty and why that judge would have done so.
Has anyone estimated the number of votes that were lost to voter suppression in the 2024 election? 2021 and 2024 were years that saw draconian voter suppression measures passed in state legislatures. I’m kind of stunned that to my knowledge, no one has quantified how many votes were suppressed.