FULTON COUNTY — In January, FBI agents armed with a warrant raided an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election. On January 28, agents took paper ballots, digital scans of the ballots, receipts from tabulator machines, and voter rolls from a Fulton County election office.

The U.S. Department of Justice stated the materials are part of a criminal investigation into how Fulton County officials and workers handled the 2020 election. Rather than wait for its own civil litigation involving the ballots to conclude, the department launched a criminal case that enabled the immediate seizure.

Fulton County officials have accused the Department of Justice of misleading the magistrate judge who approved the warrant, alleging the department provided a “gross mischaracterization of the facts” and failed to disclose that prior audits and recounts had already addressed the claims. Officials also said the department did not inform the court that the ballots were part of ongoing civil litigation, including a case filed by the Justice Department itself.

The warrant application was initiated by Kurt Olsen, a lawyer and former White House adviser who assisted Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and was filed by a U.S. attorney in Missouri, not Georgia. The probable cause cited in the affidavit reportedly relied on a report from an election conspiracy group that alleged missing records, unauthorized system access, and unverified ballot counting. The nonpartisan States United Democracy Center said the report contains “no legitimate conclusions,” suffers from “extensive analytical and factual flaws,” and repeats claims already debunked.

“It’s really important for the public, for grand juries, for judges to not allow these actions to become some kind of precedent,” said Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice. Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at Campaign Legal Center, said, “There is understandable concern that this is a dry run for going after ballot seizures in an ongoing election.”

Baldwin added that seizing original ballots—rather than providing copies or supervised access—is highly irregular. “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,” she said. She also noted that under the Civil Rights Act, the federal government may inspect ballots and request copies but questioned the need for originals: “It is impossible for me to imagine why, in any kind of legitimate investigation, why the federal government should need to seize original ballots.”