The Justice Department announced Friday that it is suing Fulton County, Georgia, to obtain ballots and other voting records related to the 2020 general election, marking an expansion of President Donald Trump’s push to find evidence to substantiate his false claims of widespread voter fraud in the election he lost five years ago.
Those claims have been exhaustively investigated, litigated and disproven since Trump and his allies attempted to submit fake slates of electors in seven battleground states — Georgia among them — in an illegal attempt to undermine the results of the 2020 election.
The lawsuit, filed in the northern district of Georgia by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, cites “the Attorney General’s investigation into Fulton County’s compliance with federal election law.”
The department is demanding that local election officials hand over “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
The north-central Georgia county, which encompasses parts of Atlanta, has been a flashpoint for Trump’s election conspiracies since his loss in the 2020 general election made him the first Republican presidential candidate to lose there since 1992.
Friday’s legal action comes in the wake of the dismissal of a high-profile criminal case against Trump, former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and more than a dozen co-conspirators for allegedly conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. It was the last criminal case against Trump to be dropped after his return to the White House in January.
The president has been ratcheting up the pressure on his administration to focus the power of the state on substantiating his conspiracy theories around the 2020 election. Trump installed Kurt Olsen, a lawyer and vocal election denier, as a “special government employee” tasked with investigating the 2020 election in late October.
Georgia’s Republican-controlled State Election Board voted this summer to resurrect a probe into claims of voter fraud in Fulton County, calling on the Justice Department to help “effect compliance with voting transparency,” according to Friday’s suit.
The DOJ attempted to secure the ballots in October but was denied access by Fulton County Superior Court Clerk Ché Alexander, who is cited in the lawsuit, who said the election records are sealed and can’t be turned over without a court order.
Dhillon argued in the lawsuit that by refusing to produce the sealed documents, Alexander violated the record retention requirements in the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
The Fulton County Board of Elections and Georgia State Election Board did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
In addition to suing Fulton County, Dhillon sued four other states on Friday as part of the DOJ’s campaign to access sensitive voter registration lists in states Trump lost in 2020, bringing the total such lawsuits to 18.
In response to the suits, 10 Democratic secretaries of state wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to express their “immense concern” over the request for state voter lists, citing concerns that the data could be shared with DHS without their knowledge.
“We are deeply concerned about the inconsistent and misleading information that Secretaries have received from the DOJ and DHS and with the potential lack of compliance with federal law,” they wrote.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter covering national politics and policy for MS NOW. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at SydneyCarruth.46 or follow her work on X and Bluesky.