Trump DOJ intervenes in long-simmering election integrity dispute over 2020 election in Georgia

The Trump Justice Department is intervening in a long-simmering election integrity dispute over 2020 vote counting, demanding that Georgia's largest county turn over to federal officials records that they have refused to give under subpoena to state election regulators.

The request to Fulton County, home to the city of Atlanta, was sent last week by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet K. Dhillon, whose division oversees election laws, after the State Elections Board had tried unsuccessfully for months to get certain historical election records from the county.

Details of request for records

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office documented widespread irregularities with voting procedures and counting in Fulton during the 2020 election, and Gov. Brian Kemp even ordered vote counts to be investigated after alleged errors were found. 

The Guardian reported that "To justify its request, the justice department cited a provision of the Civil Rights Act that requires election officials to retain election records and gives the attorney general the right to request them. The law requires records be retained for 22 months after a federal election – a period that has long elapsed since the 2020 contest."

Raffensperger concluded none of the problems were serious enough to overturn the results, in which Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump, and that there was no conspiracy by county election workers to cheat during the election.

The GOP-led State Elections Board revived some of those questions about 2020 voting last year, voting to subpoena records. The county did not comply, and the state attorney general's office has not moved to enforce the subpoena. That prompted the board to pass a resolution this summer asking DOJ to assist, which prompted Dhillon's letter on Thursday.

Dhillon: Goal is to ensure compliance with laws

“Transparency seems to have been frustrated at multiple turns in Georgia,” Dhillon wrote. "The State Election Board has cited 'unexplained anomalies in vote tabulation and storage related to the 2020 election' in a letter to you dated November 7, 2024. The Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division has also been made aware, in correspondence to it on August 1, 2025 from voter transparency advocates, of multiple instances of government obstruction of transparency requests, including high-resolution ballot scans, signature verification documentation, and various metadata requests."

Dhillon said her goal was simply to ensure Georgia's latest county was complying with federal election laws, and to address any lingering questions about the 2020 vote count in that battleground.

"The purpose of this request is to ascertain Georgia's compliance with various provisions of the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act including, without limitation, compliance with provisions relating to election technology and administration standards," she wrote. "Courts have examined requests such as these and have concluded that, in the context of voter registration lists, such requests 'fit[] comfortably within this legal framework' of federal oversight."

You can read that letter here.

Fulton County elections officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Just the News.

Dhillon told Just the News in an interview a week ago that her office has ongoing lawsuits in eight states to make sure election regulators are following the law, including keeping their voter rolls updated to ensure no noncitizens or departed residents are in a position to vote.

States that don't comply will lose federal funding

"This is an important task and tool that has really been neglected. In fact, when we started to bring these cases, some of the legacy lawyers in the Civil Rights Division told us that they were unfamiliar with how to do these cases," she explained. "They've never been done in this in the, you know, Civil Rights Division before. So we're proud to bring back the statutes and enforce them."

She made clear that states found to flout the law will lose federal funding.

"What's interesting is how we do so much in our country today is states think that they're entitled to a lot of federal funding, but they actually aren't," she said. "You're not entitled to federal funding unless you're complying with federal law, and so they're not used to anybody enforcing this mechanism."

DOJ also announced it  was sending election monitors to watch polls in California and New Jersey during their general elections next week.

"Sometimes we get requests as a Department of Justice in elections, from candidates, from campaigns, from sometimes state officials, to send monitors into elections to ensure integrity, particularly in areas where there may have been questions about it or a history of noncompliance with our Federal Voting rights laws," she said.

"And so this DOJ Civil Rights Division is sending election monitors to Passaic County, New Jersey, and to several counties in California where we've been requested to," she added. "This has met with some resistance by some state officials that Governor Newsom has gone nuts, so criticizing this, but I don't recall ever hearing him object, or prior Democrat governors objecting when the Democrat Department of Justice sent election monitors to these jurisdictions. And so turn about is fair play. We're just responding to requests from folks."

While legacy media have tried to downplay concerns about Fulton County's election history, Just the News spent months reviewing Fulton County election results after the 2020 election, and chronicled widespread concerns.

That state’s handpicked election monitor himself documented two dozen pages of mismanagement and irregularities during vote counting in Atlanta in November 2020, including double-scanning of ballots, insecure transport of ballots, and violations of voter privacy.

Kemp: Fulton County did "a sloppy job"

And the State Election Board concluded in 2024 that Fulton County had likely scanned more than 3,000 ballots twice during the 2020 presidential election recount.

Even Brian Kemp, the state's popular Republican governor and a defender of the 2020 election results, admitted that Fulton County did a "sloppy" job counting votes and administering the election and asked the Election Board to investigate, leaing to the dusplicate counting findings.

"The data that exists in public view on the Secretary of State's website of the RLA Report does not inspire confidence," he wrote in his 2022 referral letter. "It is sloppy, inconsistent, and presents questions about what processes were used by Fulton County to arrive at the result."

You can read that here: