Ballots Have Been Seized Across the US. No One Knows What Will Happen Next | WIRED
Skip to main contentCommentLoaderSave 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.Fulton County, GeorgiaOf 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.Maricopa County, ArizonaIn 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 Republi