Legal fight escalates over Georgia voting records as Trump says he wants
to ‘take over’ elections
[February 05, 2026]
By KATE BRUMBACK and NICHOLAS RICCARDI
ATLANTA (AP) — Officials in Georgia's Fulton County said Wednesday they
have asked a federal court to order the FBI to return ballots and other
documents from the 2020 election that it seized last week, escalating a
voting battle as President Donald Trump says he wants to “take over”
elections from Democratic-run areas with the November midterms on the
horizon.
The FBI had searched a warehouse near Atlanta where those records were
stored, a move taken after Trump's persistent demands for retribution
over claims, without evidence, that fraud cost him victory in Georgia.
Trump's election comment came in an interview Monday with a conservative
podcaster and the Republican president reaffirmed his position in Oval
Office remarks the next day, citing f raud allegations that numerous
audits, investigations and courts have debunked.
Officials in heavily Democratic Fulton County referenced those
statements in announcing their legal action at a time of increasing
anxiety over Trump's plans for the fall elections that will determine
control of Congress.
“This case is not only about Fulton County,” said the county chairman,
Robb Pitts. “This is about elections across Georgia and across the
nation.”
In a sign of that broader concern, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said
this week that he once doubted Trump would intervene in the midterms but
now “the notional idea that he will ask his loyalists to do something
inappropriate, beyond the Constitution, scares the heck out of me.”
The White House has scoffed at such fears, noting that Trump did not
intervene in the 2025 off-year elections despite some Democratic
predictions he would. But the president's party usually loses ground in
midterm elections and Trump has already tried to tilt the fall races in
his direction.
During an interview with NBC News that aired Wednesday, the president
said he will trust Republican losses in the midterms “if the results are
honest.” It's a strategy Trump has regularly used ahead of elections,
suggesting that a loss would only be due to some type of fraud.
Democratic election officials plan for interference in the midterms
Democratic state election officials have reacted to Trump’s statements,
the seizure of the Georgia election materials and his aggressive
deployment of federal officers into Democratic-leaning cities by
planning for a wide range of possible scenarios this fall. That includes
how they would respond if Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers
were stationed outside polling places.
They also have raised concerns about U.S. Department of Justice
lawsuits, mostly targeting Democratic states, seeking detailed voter
data that includes dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers.
Secretaries of state have raised concerns that the administration is
building a database it can use to potentially disenfranchise voters in
future elections.
Trump and his allies have long fixated on Fulton County, Georgia’s most
populous, since he narrowly lost the state to Democrat Joe Biden in
2020. In the weeks after that election, Trump called Georgia's secretary
of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, urged him to help “find” the
11,780 ballots that would enable Trump to be declared the Georgia winner
of the state and raised the prospect of a “criminal offense” if the
official failed to comply.
Raffensperger did not change the vote tally, and Biden won Georgia's 16
electoral votes. Days later, rioters swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6,
2021, and tried to prevent the official certification of Biden's
victory. When Trump returned to the presidency in January 2025, he
pardoned more than 1,000 charged in that siege.
“The president himself and his allies, they refuse to accept the fact
that they lost,” Pitts said. “And even if he had won Georgia, he would
still have lost the presidency.”
Pitts defended the county’s election practices and said Fulton has
conducted 17 elections since 2020 without any issues.
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President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after signing a spending
bill that ends a partial shutdown of the federal government in the
Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026, in
Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
‘The results will be the same,’ says Georgia election official
A warrant cover sheet provided to the county includes a list of items
that the agents were seeking related to the 2020 general election: all
ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners that tally the votes,
electronic ballot images created when the ballots were counted and then
recounted, and all voter rolls.
The FBI drove away with hundreds of boxes of ballots and other
documents. County officials say they were not told why the federal
government wanted the documents.
The county is also asking the court to unseal the sworn statement from a
law enforcement agent that was presented to the judge who approved the
search warrant.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the county's motion.
“What they’re doing with the ballots that they have now, we don’t know,
but if they’re counted fairly and honestly, the results will be the
same,” Pitts said.
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's director of national intelligence, was at the
Fulton search last week, and Democrats in Congress have questioned the
propriety of her presence because the search was a law enforcement, not
intelligence, action.
In a letter to top Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence
committees Monday, Gabbard said Trump asked her to be there “under my
broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze
intelligence related to election security.”
During the NBC News interview, Trump said he didn't know why Gabbard was
in Fulton County, but suggested without providing evidence that other
countries were meddling in elections: “A lot of the cheating, it’s
international cheating.”
Trump pushes for federal control of elections
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the
president's “take over” remarks, which included a vague reference to “15
places” that should be targeted, were a reference to the SAVE Act,
legislation that would tighten proof of citizenship requirements.
Republicans want to bring it up for a vote in Congress.
But in his remarks that day, Trump did not cite the proposal. Instead,
he claimed that Democratic-controlled places such as Atlanta, which
falls mainly in Fulton County, have “horrible corruption on elections.
And the federal government should not allow that.”
The Constitution vests states with the ability to administer elections.
Congress can add rules for federal races. One of Trump's earliest
second-term actions was an executive order that tried to rewrite voting
rules nationwide. Judges have largely blocked it because it violates the
Constitution.
Trump contended that states were “agents of the federal government to
count the votes. If they can't count the votes legally and honestly,
then somebody else should take over.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Wednesday said he supported the SAVE Act
but not Trump's desire for a federal takeover. “Nationalizing elections
and picking 15 states seems a little off strategy,” Tillis told
reporters.
___
Associated Press video journalist Nathan Ellgren in Washington
contributed to this report.
___
Riccardi reported from Denver.
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