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- Court Decisions on Election Claims
- Georgia’s Multiple Recounts and Audits
- The Italian Satellite Conspiracy Theory
- The Director of National Intelligence at a County Election Office
- Legal Questions About the Search Warrant
- Standards for Overturning Elections in Court
- Impact on Election Officials
- Challenges in Prosecuting Election Cases
- The 2026 Elections and Ongoing Investigations
On January 28, 2026, federal agents walked into Fulton County’s election office with a search warrant seeking original ballots from the 2020 election. Within hours, President Trump was posting on Truth Social about Italian military satellites hacking voting machines and Chinese coordination of election manipulation. “This is only the beginning,” he wrote.
More than 60 courts examined these exact claims. Judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats, by Trump himself, heard the evidence and issued detailed rulings. They didn’t refuse to look. They looked and found the claims didn’t hold up.
So why is the FBI seizing ballots in 2026 to investigate allegations that courts spent 2020 and 2021 systematically rejecting?
Court Decisions on Election Claims
Researchers tracked 194 separate court decisions across all the 2020 cases. Only 28 favored Trump—14 percent. In federal courts, of 44 votes by federal judges, one sided with Trump’s position.
Republican-appointed state judges ruled against Trump more than two-thirds of the time. Trump’s own appointees to federal courts rejected his cases when they heard them. Judge Stephanos Bibas, whom Trump appointed to the Third Circuit, wrote: “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
When judges reached the actual facts of the case, they found the same problem everywhere: the evidence didn’t support the claims. Some cases got dismissed on procedure—filed too late, the wrong person filing, sloppy paperwork.
In Arizona, where Trump lost by about 10,500 votes, the court found plaintiffs “failed to meet the type of evidence courts require” and that evidence “failed to show fraud or misconduct”. The ballot-counting process was 99.45 percent accurate. The inaccuracies were human error, not manipulation.
In Michigan, courts found the fraud allegations “speculative, filled with ‘guess-work,’ and often unsubstantiated.”
Georgia’s Multiple Recounts and Audits
Georgia became the focal point partly because Trump had won it in 2016 and lost it in 2020. Biden won Georgia by about 12,600 votes out of nearly 5 million cast—a 0.2 percent margin. When Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger realized the margin was so slim, he ordered a complete hand tally of nearly 5 million ballots.
The Carter Center, which monitors elections in developing democracies, deployed observers to 24 counties accounting for more than 60 percent of votes cast. When workers manually recounted the ballots, they found a few thousand that had been missed due to human error—normal for a recount of this size. It confirmed Biden’s victory. Georgia then conducted a machine recount using different procedures with the same outcome. The Carter Center’s final report concluded the process “should serve as the basis for increased confidence in Georgia’s electoral system.”
Despite this, Fulton County became the target. Rudy Giuliani held press conferences making claims about ballot handling in Atlanta. Sidney Powell made increasingly elaborate allegations. Trump himself called Raffensperger and, according to the transcript, told him he’d made a “big risk” by not agreeing there was fraud.
During that call, Trump made specific allegations about dead voters, non-citizens voting, vote switching. His own Attorney General, William Barr, had authorized the Justice Department to investigate these claims—unusual for the Justice Department, which normally stays out of election disputes. Barr later told reporters: “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
When Trump kept pressing, Barr explained the claims “were not meritorious” and “are not panning out.” He reminded Trump that “the Justice Department doesn’t take sides in elections” and “is not an extension of your legal team.”
That video Giuliani cited as evidence of ballot manipulation in Atlanta? FBI agents examined it and determined “nothing irregular happened in the counting and the allegations made by Mr. Giuliani were false.” The “suitcase” of ballots was a secure storage container designed for ballot storage, used as intended.
The Italian Satellite Conspiracy Theory
Among the theories about how Trump could have lost, few achieved the level of elaboration as “Italygate”—the claim that Italian military satellites remotely switched votes from Trump to Biden in an operation coordinated through the U.S. Embassy in Rome. It originated with Maria Strollo Zack, a Georgia-based lobbyist who reported telling Trump about the conspiracy at Mar-a-Lago on December 24, 2020. The theory involved an alleged Italian hacker named Arturo D’Elia who supposedly confessed to using military satellites in Pescara, Italy to change U.S. results.
When American men tried to access an Italian prison to interrogate D’Elia, the Italian bureau of prisons investigated. D’Elia himself denied involvement, telling reporters: “I didn’t steal anything. I didn’t pass anything to anyone. I created malware.”
During Trump’s final weeks in office, his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows forwarded Italygate claims to acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and directed both the Justice Department and the Department of Defense to investigate. Rosen forwarded the claims to his deputy, Richard Donoghue, who responded by describing them as “pure insanity.”
The Washington Post later characterized Italygate as “the craziest fraud conspiracy” being pushed by Trump associates, evidence of “how desperate President Donald Trump and his team were to grab hold of something—anything—that could cast doubt on his defeat.”
Reuters and USA Today examined the claims and described them as “false” and “baseless.” American voting machines—particularly those used in Georgia—operate on computers not connected to the internet. Remote manipulation via satellite isn’t difficult. It’s technically impossible under the systems in place.
Yet when Trump resumed the presidency in 2025 and appointed new officials to oversee the Justice Department, the Italian satellite theory, along with other discredited claims, began circulating again in official channels.
The Director of National Intelligence at a County Election Office
Tulsi Gabbard’s presence at the Fulton County raid raised immediate questions. She’s the Director of National Intelligence. That office, by law and presidential order, focuses on foreign intelligence threats, not county administration in Georgia.
One administration official told reporters: “It remains a mystery to me why she would need to be there.”
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, was more direct: “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has no domestic responsibilities. There is no reason for the director of national intelligence to be in any kind of voting site. She has neither the authority nor the competence to assess anything in that voting site.”
Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote that there are only two explanations for Gabbard’s presence: either she discovered legitimate evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 vote and failed to inform congressional intelligence committees as required by law, or she’s “demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”
Rules limiting what intelligence agencies can do at home date back to 1981. That order says the CIA and other intelligence agencies can’t spy on Americans, except in rare cases involving foreign threats.
Gabbard, confirmed as Director of National Intelligence, had alleged that senior U.S. intelligence officials under Obama were guilty of treason for concluding that Russia interfered in the 2016 vote. She’d begun accessing voting machines and data from swing states, despite the lack of any demonstrated foreign intelligence connection.
Legal Questions About the Search Warrant
Experts questioned whether the federal government has the legal right to reopen investigations into claims courts have already examined and rejected.
The warrant claimed violations of two federal laws: the Civil Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act. The five-year legal deadline for bringing charges for violations of the National Voter Registration Act expired long ago. The Civil Rights Act requires records be maintained for 22 months after an election, meaning Fulton County would have been justified in destroying the records years ago.
“By any measure of that five years—whether it was the date of the vote or some date in the immediate aftermath—that statute has run, it’s over,” Becker told reporters. “There is no possible claim that could be brought that would pierce that statute of limitations.”
Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, wrote on the Election Law Blog expressing puzzlement at what a federal magistrate judge might have seen to authorize a warrant when the legal deadline appeared to be an insurmountable bar to prosecution. “I’m curious what the FBI showed to get a federal magistrate to sign off on probable cause that the elections office intentionally threw documentation away before the 22-month mark, which ran in September 2022.”
A court cannot issue a search warrant based on probable cause that a crime was committed unless there’s evidence any crime happened. Becker noted that “warrants are supposed to only be issued upon probable cause that the places searched or effects seized will turn up evidence of a prosecutable offense.” The 2020 vote “has withstood more scrutiny than any election in world history.”
The seizure years after an election presents separate concerns. Once ballots leave secure storage, it becomes harder to track who handled them. “We have no idea what’s going to happen to those ballots once they’re seized,” Becker warned.
A month before the FBI raid, the Department of Justice had sued Fulton County for access to the same records it would later seize with the warrant, seeking the materials through civil litigation. Fulton County had moved to dismiss that lawsuit, arguing federal law didn’t authorize the government to demand such records. As of the raid date, the civil litigation remained active with no ruling yet issued.
The government was simultaneously pursuing civil litigation to obtain records and executing a criminal search warrant to seize them.
Standards for Overturning Elections in Court
When someone challenges an election in court, judges require proof that specific violations actually changed who won. Showing that procedures were different from what someone wanted, or even that they didn’t follow the rulebook, usually isn’t enough. Courts require proof that the violations actually changed the election results.
When plaintiffs in Arizona’s cases “failed to prove that the board or any of its members were guilty of wrongdoing,” and “failed to prove that defendants had manipulated or altered the outcome,” the court’s reasoning reflected this standard.
Fraud allegations need very strong proof—stronger than what’s needed in regular lawsuits. When Trump’s lawyers presented declarations from poll watchers as evidence, courts found these declarations “did not allege fraud at all, but rather raised concerns about the manner and process by which officials matched signatures on absentee ballots.” “None of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses stated that defendants committed any fraud; instead, they only guessed about what might have happened.”
Both state and federal judges use the same standard. When judges applied it, they were enforcing the ordinary rules that govern how elections are challenged in America. Courts at every level—state and federal, trial and appeals—rejected these claims using the same rules.
Impact on Election Officials
According to a Brennan Center survey, 38 percent of local election officials faced threats, harassment, or abuse. By 2024, more than half of local officials reported being concerned about the safety of their colleagues or staff. More than one in four worried about being assaulted at home or work.
The threats targeting workers occurred with particular intensity in jurisdictions singled out by Trump and his allies as sites of fraud. Fulton County workers came under sustained pressure. Georgia workers who conducted the extensive hand recount received threats. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State who certified Trump’s loss, faced sustained pressure and eventually left office.
Ongoing investigations and federal law enforcement actions discourage people from doing their jobs. Qualified people avoid election jobs, and current officials worry they might be prosecuted for doing their work. A 2025 Brennan Center report found that 59 percent of officials feared politicians would interfere with their work, and 46 percent were concerned about potential politically motivated investigations of themselves or their peers.
Challenges in Prosecuting Election Cases
If federal prosecutors were to bring charges based on materials obtained in the Fulton County raid, they’d face serious legal problems.
Criminal cases require even stronger proof than civil cases. Prosecutors would need to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and prove intentional wrongdoing that changed the election results—not just that procedures were questionable. Administration involves thousands of decisions by many officials and workers, many of them routine and left to their judgment. Proving someone intentionally did something wrong and that it changed the results would be very difficult.
Federal fraud charges have strict requirements. A prosecutor would need to prove someone intentionally broke the law, not just that a procedure was unusual.
The statute of limitations issue that concerned legal experts before the raid doesn’t disappear through the seizure. Unless prosecutors can prove someone intentionally broke the law within the legal deadline, they can’t bring charges.
The 2026 Elections and Ongoing Investigations
Reopening 2020 investigations and putting election skeptics in power raises serious questions about how the 2026 midterms will be run.
Becker warned that the administration will use its actions to spread false fraud claims and distrust, especially when elections don’t go the President’s way.
Officials in contested states have expressed particular concern. One Arizona official noted the state destroyed 2020 ballots as required by law, so the federal government couldn’t seize them. Pennsylvania officials said they weren’t aware of any similar federal raids and emphasized their 2020 election was secure and upheld by courts.
Court decisions are supposed to be final. But the FBI and other law enforcement can still investigate the same claims again. The Trump administration seems to believe it can reopen investigations courts already closed—even though the same problems that made courts reject them would still be there.
What’s changed isn’t the evidence. It’s who’s in charge of deciding whether to investigate.
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