Judge denies request to return 2020 ballots seized from Fulton County, Georgia

A federal judge on Thursday rejected a request from local officials in Georgia to order the return of key evidence seized as part of the FBI investigation into the state’s counting of votes from the 2020 election.

U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee said he found some aspects of an FBI affidavit submitted to obtain the search warrant “troubling.” But he concluded that officials in Fulton County had not proven their rights were “callously disregarded” either through defects in the search warrant obtained to seize more than 600 boxes of materials related to that election, including original ballots, or through the way the search was carried out.

Moreover, the judge deemed unpersuasive concerns raised by the county that allowing the FBI to keep the ballots in its custody might cause doubt in the public about local control over elections.

The ruling by Boulee, an appointee of President Donald Trump, clears the way for the Justice Department to move forward with its inquiry into the president’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, a contest he lost in Georgia by about 12,000 votes.

The president has remained fixated on that defeat and continues to promote baseless accusations of fraud as he pushes for more national control over state-run elections. Multiple audits, nearly a dozen court rulings and Trump’s former attorney general, William P. Barr, have previously concluded there was no evidence of widespread errors or wrongdoing sufficient to affect the outcome of the race in Georgia.

The FBI’s seizure in January of Fulton County’s voting materials — including all of the ballots cast in the 2020 vote — has stoked alarm among election officials and democracy advocates across the country, who have condemned the Justice Department’s efforts to relitigate the election’s outcome six years on.

The current investigation began with a referral in January from former Trump campaign lawyer and prominent election denier Kurt Olsen, who Trump named last year to a White House post tasked with monitoring election integrity.

In recent months, the Justice Department has also launched an inquiry into Arizona’s 2020 results. Trump, meanwhile, has continued to demand that Republican lawmakers “nationalize elections,” and impose voter ID requirements, ban voting machines and eliminate mail-in voting in states across the country.

Fulton County officials sued days after the January raid, seeking the return of the material and arguing investigators misled an Atlanta-area federal magistrate judge to obtain a warrant authorizing the seizure.