FBI search warrant at Georgia warehouse cites law prohibiting fraud by election workers

Last week's FBI raid on a Georgia warehouse yielded approximately 700 boxes of ballots and other related materials from the 2020 election and was focused on finding evidence of possible fraud under statutes governing the conduct of election workers in the state's largest metropolitan area.

The search warrant for the Fulton County election hub near Atlanta was signed by a federal magistrate and specifically cited Title 52 of the U.S. Code, Sections 20511 and 20701, according to sources in Georgia who have seen the still-sealed warrant.

Those statutes govern the conduct of election workers when it comes to preserving records of elections and how ballots are issued and counted.

Specifically, the law bans someone who "knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by: (A) the procurement or submission of voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held; or (B) the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held."

Fulton County elections official Sherri Allen told local media that FBI agents seized approximately 700 boxes of election-related records from the 2020 presidential election.

Those same records were also the focus of a civil case against Fulton County involving the Georgia State Elections Board and the U.S. Justice Department.

Irregularities in ballots, record preservation

More details about what prompted the raid are expected to be made public in the coming days when the affidavit filed by FBI agents to support the warrant is released by the courts. The raid reopens an issue that President Donald Trump has focused on for more than five years.

It also follows years of reporting from Just the News which found irregularities in the counting of the ballots, stories which prompted Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to file an official complaint on the “sloppy” processes in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.

Kemp in 2021 referred the audited November 2020 election results in the state's largest voting metropolis to the State Election Board after multiple reviews found significant problems with absentee ballot counting that included duplicate tallies, math errors, and transposed data.

Kemp had referred Fulton County's risk-limiting audit (RLA) results to election regulators in November 2021, saying he was not asking for any changes to the declaration that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump but was alarmed by the level of sloppy vote counting in the county that includes the city of Atlanta.

"Does not inspire confidence" in the electoral process, Kemp says

The errors could have skewed the audit totals reported to the state by several thousand votes, according to a 36-item summary Kemp included with his 2021 letter. Biden was declared the state's winner by about 12,000 votes.

"The data that exists in public view on the Secretary of State's website of the RLA Report does not inspire confidence," Kemp wrote in his referral letter. "It is sloppy, inconsistent, and presents questions about what processes were used by Fulton County to arrive at the result."

Kemp's referral came several months after a Just the News investigative report earlier in 2021 first raised questions about the audited election tallies Fulton County reported to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office after conducting the hand count, known as an RLA.

Just the News reported then that the tally sheets Fulton County used for the audit/recount absentee ballots did not match totals from ballot images, in some cases appeared to include duplicate counts, and used batch numbers that did not correspond to existing ballot stacks.

Near the end of 2025, Fulton County informed the State Elections Board that tabulator tapes were not properly signed after the 2020 election, in violation of state regulations. Just the News reported that the county explained in December that it had misplaced other tabulator tapes and documents from that election.

Fulton County admits rules were not followed

Ann Brumbaugh, an attorney for the Fulton County Board of Registrations and Elections, told the board on Dec. 9, “We do not dispute that the tapes were not signed. It was a violation of the rule. They should have done it.”

She said that since the 2020 election, the county has made significant changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

“Procedures have been updated. People are taking this very seriously now,” Brumbaugh said. “Since then, the training has been enhanced, the poll watchers are trained specifically. They’ve got to sign the tapes in the morning, and they’ve got to sign the tapes when they’re run at the end of the day.”

Just the News also previously reported that the Justice Department on Dec. 12 sued Fulton County, seeking records related to the 2020 general election. Just the News reported in 2021 that Fulton County election workers took ballots that were rejected by machines because a voter marked two or more candidates in a race, and workers picked one candidate on the ballot for the winner.

The news outlet made public ballots it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in which marks against Trump's name were removed, and Joe Biden was chosen as the vote. Ordinarily, under Georgia law, ballots that are double marked for candidates are supposed to be rejected as spoiled. That procedure was ignored, and many of those unqualified ballots were interpreted as cast for Biden.

Biden was narrowly declared the winner in Georgia by a 49.47% plurality over Trump's 49.24% vote share: a margin of 0.23% or 11,779 votes. Trump won the state in 2024.