Raid could hand Georgia's elections to Trump allies in 2026 — and 2028: analysis

Atlanta Journal Constitution Senior Political columnist Patricia Murphy said the Wednesday FBI raid at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center was not about prosecuting President Donald Trump’s disproven claims of a stolen election in 2020 for the millionth time.

“Although the records they took were from the election five years ago, it’s important to understand that the raid in Fulton County is not really about the 2020 elections at all, which have long since come and gone,” said Murphy. “Instead, the raid is about the next elections — who will control them in Fulton County in 2026 and who will run them in Georgia two years after that when the 2028 presidential election takes place.”

Trump may croon that “people will soon be prosecuted” but Georgia Election Commissioner Robb Pitts said the ballots that agents seized were the same ones “counted, recounted, hand-counted, debated, litigated and fought over” after Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.

“Despite every attempt by the president and his legal team to prove the election had been stolen from him at the time, every road led back to the same result — Trump lost and Joe Biden won,” said Murphy. “The … question at hand is who will oversee Fulton County elections in 2026.”

Currently, elections are run by the Fulton County Election Board. But Republicans in the General Assembly passed a massive new voting law that contained language giving the Georgia State Election Board the power to replace any so-called “underperforming” county election board, including Fulton County’s, with an interim leader of their choosing.

“Replacement could only happen after an audit or investigation, and the state board left Fulton’s elections in the hands of county officials in 2023 after it said the county had made “substantial improvements” to its processes during a performance review,” said Murphy.

However, Fulton County is a large, cosmopolitan and overwhelmingly blue region of an otherwise red state, so Republicans consider it a bad actor interfering with their plan for political dominance. It was just a few years ago that the county’s population singlehandedly handed Trump his nasty defeat, turning the Southern state of Georgia blue for President Joe Biden.

Trump was furious, and so were his Republican allies — who seized upon the county’s past record of long lines, late returns and slow bookkeeping, mostly due to its inordinately high population.

“On 2020, the president went further, claiming that Fulton County was a hotbed of so much nefarious activity and rampant fraud that it cost him the election, all accusations that his White House staff dismissed and multiple courts in Georgia threw out,” Murphy wrote.

She added that thanks to the work of the state’s majority Republican government the current majority on the State Election Board “now includes three Republican members whom Trump infamously singled out in 2024 as ‘pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.’”

Two of the so-called “pit bulls” were actually with the FBI in Union City during the Wednesday raid, Murphy said.

“If this week’s raid produces enough of a pretext for the board to act in the future, the 2026 elections in Fulton County could be overseen by someone picked by the pro-Trump State Board, not by elected Fulton commissioners themselves,” Murphy warned.

Read the AJC report at this link.