Mother Jones illustration; Aaron Schwartz/CNP/ZUMA; rvin Temka/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP
On Monday, in a dramatic escalation of his administration’s attempt to interfere in the midterm elections, President Trump called on Republicans “to take over the voting in at least 15 places.”
Trump’s efforts “to nationalize the voting,” as he put it, will be difficult to pull off, since states have control over the administration of elections under the Constitution. But there is one place he could succeed: Fulton County, Georgia, where the FBI just seized more than 650 boxes of ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in an unprecedented raid on January 28.
That’s because, in the aftermath of the president’s lies about the 2020 election, Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a sweeping rewrite of the state’s voting laws that gave the state election board (which now has a Trump-aligned MAGA majority) the extraordinary power to take over up to four county election boards that it views as “underperforming” or where local officials have lodged complaints.
‘‘Why do they want Fulton County? Well, that’s obvious. It’s the biggest county in Georgia, and it houses Atlanta. If you control Fulton County that basically guarantees for Republicans they win every statewide race.”
That means someone appointed by the election-denier majority on the state board, which oversees voting rules and election certification, could sideline the Democratic majority on the Fulton County election board and take control of election operations in the state’s largest county, a Democratic stronghold that contains most of metro Atlanta.
Democrats and voting rights experts are warning that the FBI raid in Fulton County is exactly the pretext Republicans need to initiate a takeover.
“That is 100 percent what this is about,” says Democratic State Rep. Saira Draper, who represents metro Atlanta and was present when the FBI raided the county elections center. “To the extent the President gets his ego stroked, I’m sure that’s just icing on the cake. But I think the whole purpose of this is to take over Fulton County.”
Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democratic member of the state election board, shares those concerns. “There certainly is a very strong possibility that they’re going to try to take over,” she says. With the Trump administration now in control of the ballots from 2020, “they can spin up whatever story they want.”
Janelle King, one of three election deniers on the board, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution following the raid that a takeover of Fulton County is “on the radar as an avenue we could take.” At a board meeting the week before the FBI operation, the board’s executive director James Mills, a former Republican state legislator, explicitly threatened to remove the elections chief in Fulton County, saying he was “ready to do something drastic.”
A pro-Trump majority gained control of the state election board in 2024 and were infamously praised by the president in August 2024 as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” The board attempted to pass a series of rule changes in advance of the 2024 election that would have made it easier to throw out votes and contest election results, which state courts ultimately blocked.
If someone appointed by the state board were to gain control of elections in Fulton County, which is more than 40 percent Black and where Trump lost by 44 points in 2024, “they could really devastate opportunities for Fulton County voters to exercise their franchise,” Tindall Ghazal warns. That could mean purging voters from the rolls, cutting polling locations, limiting early voting hours, challenging voters’ eligibility to cast a ballot, and attempting to refuse to certify election results if a Democrat wins.
“It would mean that they would never certify an election that didn’t have Republicans winning everything,” says Fulton County Commissioner Mo Ivory, a Democrat. “That’s what this is about. It’s about the ultimate certification of elections. So if they take over elections, they can refuse to certify.” (State courts in Georgia have ruled that certification is “mandatory” but election deniers are trying to challenge that holding.)
A MAGA takeover of Fulton County would have huge ripple effects across Georgia, both in 2026, when the state has competitive elections for every top statewide race and the US Senate, and in 2028.
‘‘Why do they want Fulton County?” asks Draper. “Well, that’s obvious. It’s the biggest county in Georgia, and it houses Atlanta. If you control Fulton County that basically guarantees for Republicans they win every statewide race.”
The MAGA disinformation campaign against Fulton County dates back to Election Night 2020, when Trump and his supporters spread lies about “suitcases” of ballots being counted after GOP poll monitors left. These claims were thoroughly debunked and the Georgia results audited three times. Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani was ultimately ordered to pay $148 million for defaming two Black election workers in Fulton County who he falsely accused of election fraud.
But even as Trump’s lies were refuted, his allies sought to gain more control over state elections. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who had resisted Trump’s demand to “find 11,780” votes to overturn Biden’s victory, as chair and a voting member of the state election board.
Later that year the board, which was in the process of being taken over by Trump’s allies, initiated a performance review of Fulton County, the first step toward a possible takeover. In 2023, however, the state board unanimously voted not to replace the county board, praising them for making “significant improvements” in election administration.
‘‘This is nothing more than a rehash of conspiracy theories and people not understanding how elections actually work.”
But when Trump-aligned members gained a majority at the beginning of 2024, they intensified scrutiny of the county, seizing on small administrative errors, such as when the county accidentally double counted 3,000 ballots during a recount of the 2020 election, which did not change the outcome (Trump actually gained 1,000 votes during the recount).
The board appointed a bipartisan team to monitor the 2024 election in Fulton County, who praised the county’s election operations as “organized and orderly” in the run-up to the election. Nonetheless, on election night 2024, as Fulton County election workers dealt with bomb threats in the middle of a heated presidential election, the state board voted to subpoena records from the 2020 election, escalating its campaign against the county.
When Trump returned to office, the board’s MAGA majority felt empowered to escalate its probe into the 2020 results in Fulton County, which remained an obsession for Trump.
At the very end of a two-day state board meeting in July 2025, the board’s Trump-aligned majority voted to approve a resolution calling on the DOJ to “take any action necessary” to help them seize documents from Fulton County related to the 2020 election. The board chairman, Republican John Fervier, noted that he was “adamantly opposed” to the resolution, which passed 3-2.
The DOJ quickly acted on the board’s request, first with demand letters from Attorney General Pam Bondi asserting that the county had to hand over “all records… responsive to the recent subpoena issued to your office by the State Election Board.” The county replied that the records sought were under seal because of a Georgia statute and “may not be produced without a court order.” So, the DOJ filed a civil lawsuit in December, requesting the court make Fulton County comply.
It was one of two dozen lawsuits the DOJ has filed seeking extensive voting-related materials for federal review. Thus far, courts have rejected the DOJ’s arguments, possibly explaining Trump’s latest escalation, which he hinted at during a speech at Davos on January 21. People would “soon be prosecuted for what they did” in the “rigged” 2020 election, the president said.
A week later, the FBI obtained its criminal warrant to raid the Fulton County election center and collect ballots, voter rolls, and other 2020 election records. The impetus for that criminal investigation, according to The Atlantic, was a 263-page report written by conservative activists recycling old, disproven, and irrelevant claims.
Cleta Mitchell, the onetime Trump lawyer who helped the president try to overturn the election in Georgia and took part in the call when Trump demanded that Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes,” claimed last week the report was “THE answer to everyone’s question” of why the FBI raided Fulton’s election warehouse. She said one of the report’s main authors, Kevin Moncla, “dotted every I and crossed every t and it is stunning.”
Moncla has been making debunked claims about the election for years and was referred to the FBI by Georgia election officials for sending threatening emails. He also has a lengthy criminal history, which includes pleading guilty to a misdemeanor voyeurism charge and being ordered to pay $3.25 million for secretly filming house guests, a couple and their two young children, in his bathroom.
“There’s nothing in there that has not already been investigated by Georgia certified law enforcement investigators, reported on to the state election board, and never once has any sort of criminal act been identified,” Ghazal tells Mother Jones. “This is nothing more than a rehash of conspiracy theories and people not understanding how elections actually work.”
For example, the report points to Fulton County ordering a little more than a million absentee ballots shortly before the 2020 general election, suggesting that these ballots were “used nefariously—and injected or cast as regular absentee ballots.” However, the report itself provides no evidence of such an infusion and points out that having extra emergency ballots on hand is not illegal; in fact, it is statutorily required. While Fulton County officials ordered more than the typical amount, they had understandable reasons; machine issues in the primary had caused at least one county to run out of provisional ballots, and a COVID outbreak among Fulton County staff in late October complicated machine testing and training for the general election.
The report also spends nine pages rehashing the baseless theory that “suitcases” of improper ballots were going to be conveniently snuck into vote counts after partisan election monitors left State Farm Arena, a large polling site.
Raffensperger’s office has repeatedly disproven that claim. “What you saw—the secret suitcase with magic ballots—were actually ballots that had been packed into those absentee ballot carriers by the workers in the plain view of the [partisan election] monitors and the press,” Gabriel Sterling, who served as Raffensperger’s election system implementation manager, said at the time.
Not to say the election in Georgia was conducted perfectly, especially in the chaotic COVID-era. Philip Stark, a Berkeley professor whose research on post-election audits was cited by the report, says many Georgia counties struggle with maintaining paper election records. But there’s a distinction, he says, between procedural mistakes and “deliberate malfeasance.”
“What I keep seeing in reports is just sort of equating ‘It wasn’t done well’ with ‘It was rigged,’” Stark says. “I’ve seen no evidence that it was.”
Most recently, members of the state election board have been in an uproar over Fulton County’s failure to sign tabulator tapes—essentially receipts of votes cast—for 300,000 ballots during early voting in 2020. But that does not mean those votes were illegal or invalid.
“It’s an insane position to take that, because you miss this one bureaucratic step out of 500 steps that happen in an election, that you should then nullify the votes of 300,000 people,” says Draper, the Democratic state Rep. “But that is exactly the kind of attitude that is taken towards mistakes in Fulton County. That’s exactly the kind of attitude that will be taken when they look at the ballots and whatever else they got through the warrant in Fulton County, to point to anything and say, ‘this is a big deal.’”
For election deniers in Georgia, the raid—and resulting possibility that the DOJ uncovers smoking-gun “proof” of a crooked election from the seized materials—was cause for celebration. Several prominent election deniers quickly applauded the operation and seemingly took credit for it. Two of the MAGA-aligned state board members, Jan Johnston and Salleigh Grubbs, observed the FBI raid while two other prominent 2020 skeptics, Garland Favorito and Jason Frazier, posted a selfie in front of the “Crime Scene Do Not Cross” tape in front of the building.
And while the alleged criminal investigation centers around the 2020 election, what happens next will likely have major implications for upcoming ones. Trump adviser Steve Bannon invited the election denial activists who witnessed the raid on his podcast the day after for a victory lap. “Yes it is about 2026,” Bannon said. “And it’s about 2028. We are not ever going to allow you to steal another election.”