Ahead of the FBI raid at the Fulton County election headquarters, an agent detailed the probe’s focus on “deficiencies or defects” from the Georgia count in the 2020 election.
“Fulton County has admitted that it does not have scanned images of all the 528,777 ballots counted during the original count or the 527,925 ballots counted during the recount,” FBI special agent Hugh Raymond Evans said in a detailed affidavit in federal district court justifying the search warrant.
“Fulton County has confirmed that during the Recount of votes, some ballots were scanned multiple times,” the affidavit continues.
“Ballot images made available in response to public record requests show ballots with unique markings duplicated within the ballot images.”
Evans further noted that auditors hand-counting the ballots reported inconsistencies, while the Georgia Performance Review Board reported that Georgia Secretary of State investigators confirmed inaccurate batch tallies from the audit.
“If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law regardless of whether the failure to retain records or the deprivation of a fair tabulation of a vote was outcome determinative for any particular election or race,” the affidavit says.
“Seizure of the election records would corroborate the analysis that evinces that election records were destroyed and or the tabulation of votes included materially false votes, either through duplicated scanning of specific ballots, interjection of pristine ballots, or other methods described above,” Evans says in asking the court to grant the search warrant.
The FBI executed the warrant on Jan. 29. This came after a yearlong clash between the State Election Board and Fulton County election officials regarding documents.
The affidavit notes that the FBI interviewed two members of the State Election Board, a Fulton County commissioner, a staffer with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office, and a cybersecurity analyst, among others. The names were redacted.
The agent also noted the issues with 315,000 mail ballots that may not have been properly certified.
“During a December 9, 2025, meeting before the State Election Board, Fulton County stated that tabulator tapes accounting for 315,000 ballots were not properly signed,” the affidavit says.
“The Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger stated in the media he considered the unsigned tabulator tapes an administrative oversight.”
On Saturday, U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee ordered the court documents in the case to be unsealed by close of business Tuesday.
Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. argued the unsealed documents show “recycled theories and politically motivated claims.”
“The unsealing of this affidavit confirms what many of us feared from the start: that this extraordinary FBI raid was rooted in recycled theories and politically motivated claims that have already been examined and rejected time and time again,” Arrington said in a statement.
