“I won it very big the last time, and I won it big [in 2016],” Trump said on October 15 during a press conference in the Oval Office, adding, “I hope they go into the votes that are being stored in Fulton County and take a real look at those votes. Because I won it the second time too,” Trump said of his 2020 election defeat.

Trump first challenged Fulton’s counting processes within days of the 2020 vote, and his call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, formed the predicate for a criminal indictment against him and several confidants, which was later dismissed after Democratic District Attorney Fani Willis was disqualified from handling the case.

His allies in Georgia flagged chain-of-custody gaps and possible duplicate scanning during the post-election audit period. Through persistent litigation from election advocates, those concerns helped preserve the ballots despite resistance from Fulton officials seeking to keep the public from seeing those records.

Now at 11 months into his second term and five years since he contested his electoral defeat to Biden, Trump’s second administration is using the full weight of the Department of Justice in an attempt to force the release of those still-sealed records.

Last month, the DOJ escalated the five-year struggle over access to Fulton County’s 2020 election ballots, demanding Georgia’s largest county produce records state officials have been unable to obtain despite subpoenas, court orders, and updated laws meant to make the materials public. An October 30 letter from Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon requested that the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections produce, within 15 days, all ballots and associated election records tied to subpoenas from the State Election Board. The timeline gives Fulton a deadline of Nov. 14 to comply.

Dhillon wrote that “transparency seems to have been frustrated at multiple turns in Georgia” and cited federal authority under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act to examine state election records and technology. Her letter also referenced “unexplained anomalies in vote tabulation and storage” flagged by state regulators and correspondence from outside transparency groups about stonewalled requests for ballot images and metadata.

The intervention came just weeks before a November 24 hearing was scheduled before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert C. I. McBurney on whether to quash the State Election Board’s outstanding subpoena for the ballots. For now, county officials continue to argue the materials remain under court seal from earlier litigation, even though the typical 24-month retention period expired in 2022.

What began as a grassroots open-records request has now branched into a multifront legal battle. Garland Favorito, co-founder of the watchdog group VoterGA, who has questioned the 2020 election results like Trump, told the Washington Examiner that six different legal avenues are seeking the same 2020 Fulton ballots. Those include two civil cases his group brought against the secretary of state and clerk custodians, a criminal discovery demand from a co-defendant of Trump charged in the election-related case, two subpoenas from the State Election Board against Fulton, and now parallel efforts from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

Favorito said he believes Trump “is not going to let this issue die, and we’re not going to let it die” either.

Favorito first sought to review absentee ballots in mid-December 2020 after election workers reported what they described as suspiciously pristine ballots during the hand-count audit, which lacked folds for envelopes and exhibited uniform voting patterns. On Dec. 23, 2020, VoterGA filed a due-process and vote-dilution claim. In 2021, the ballots were unsealed by court order, though they have remained blocked due to Fulton County’s resistance. 

By spring 2021, Georgia’s top election office moved to limit disclosure. In an April 2, 2021, amicus brief, Raffensperger, represented by the state attorney general, argued ballots must remain sealed under Georgia’s Elections Code and warned that allowing the public to handle physical ballots could constitute a felony under state law. The state’s brief urged the court to permit inspection only of ballot images and prohibit scanning or recanvassing the original ballots, claiming such access would undermine ballot integrity and spread misinformation.  

Over the two years that followed, the case bounced between judges and eventually inspired Republican-backed legislation aimed at making the ballots accessible to the public. The Georgia General Assembly passed House Bill 974 last year, which expressly treats ballots as public records when connected to disputed results, with the statute taking effect in January of this year. Yet Fulton County officials have still insisted the ballots could not be copied or released.

The dispute has since escalated into a statewide conflict, with the State Election Board pressing for access to the ballot records in late July.

Now, the DOJ is applying pressure with federal statutory citations and funding leverage. Dhillon has emphasized that states failing to comply with federal election law requirements are not entitled to federal grants tied to election administration.

The timing also suggests that DOJ officials may want to obtain the ballot records before McBurney decides, after November 24, whether the State Election Board’s subpoena will be enforced or denied. Coincidentally, McBurney is the same judge who was handed up the indictment against Trump and co-conspirators in August 2023 by a special grand jury assembled by Willis.

Despite no overwhelming smoking gun or evidence to suggest that fraud led to Trump’s defeat in 2020, multiple state-authorized reviews still documented serious mismanagement.

The state’s own election monitor produced two dozen pages of irregularities after observing Fulton’s ballot-counting operation in November 2020, including double-scanning of ballots, insecure transport, and violations of voter privacy. The State Election Board later concluded last year that Fulton County likely scanned more than 3,000 ballots twice during the recount.

Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who has defended the certified 2020 results, acknowledged significant problems. “It is sloppy, inconsistent, and presents questions about what processes were used by Fulton County to arrive at the result,” Kemp wrote in a 2022 referral letter calling for the investigation that led to the duplicate-counting findings, according to Just The News.

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Favorito’s spokeswoman said an additional press conference could happen in the ensuing weeks related to his group’s long-standing fight to obtain the 2020 ballot records.

A representative from Raffensperger’s office declined to comment to the Washington Examiner, suggesting that the disputed ballot records are something Fulton County should address. A representative for the BRE did not respond to an emailed inquiry.