As 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, Georgia
Of 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.
