The FBI election raid in Georgia was based on human error. Republicans here want more of those mistakes.
A Justice Department affidavit exposes election deniers as the source of probable cause. Their claims amount to human error. In November, there could be even more mistakes in counting ballots.
American Doom has been at the forefront of reporting on elections in Georgia. We were the first to file a motion to unseal the DOJ affidavit that led to the raid in Fulton County. This work is time-consuming and complex, and we can’t do it without your support. You can help fund our independent, adversarial journalism with a paid subscription or one-time contribution. Your dollars ensure that our journalism is accessible to all.
***
By now, the dust has settled a bit on the matter of the United States vs. Fulton County, which if there were going to be a criminal indictment over supposed fraud in the 2020 election would be the title of the case. That’s a big if — second only to the possibility of intent that is mentioned at the very end of the Justice Department affidavit that was released on Tuesday.
“If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action,” the affidavit states, referencing the many errors outlined in the document, the records seized by the FBI from Fulton County on Jan. 28 “are evidence of violations” of federal law.
That is one massive if. Throughout all the chaos in Georgia over the last five years wrought by a small but vocal group of activists and public officials whose disproven claims of election fraud form the backbone of the affidavit, there has been one huge, glaring piece of evidence they’ve never even come close to identifying: motive and intent.
Yes, there were a ridiculous and unacceptable amount of errors in the 2020 election — something even many Georgia Democrats will contend. Inundated with a historic number of mail-in ballots thanks to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 election was in many ways a chaotic mess.
Administered by a diverse group of elected and appointed officials, temporary paid workers and volunteers, and overseen by observers from both political parties, “intentional action” to illegally change 2020 election results to favor Joe Biden over Donald Trump would require these thousands of individuals from all walks of life to work in careful coordination across hundreds or thousands of individual polling locations handling millions of ballots.
Now, President Donald Trump and his allies would like to continue using those errors as pretext to interfere in November’s elections.
The grand conspiracy of 2020 has never been proven because it doesn’t exist. In fact, grand conspiracies rarely ever exist. The truth of events is rarely as interesting or damning as we often like to believe. The truth is often gray, but Georgia’s election denial movement has made it black and white.
Every single claim contained in the Justice Department affidavit fails to prove motive and intent. Instead, the claims reflect election denial activists’ exhaustive work detailing the many errors and rule violations that occurred in 2020. Those errors and violations shouldn’t be entirely dismissed, and the people who caused them should be held accountable. But in many ways, the people responsible for the errors and violations already have been held accountable.
In Fulton County, the election board has been cleansed of the members who oversaw the 2020 election. Poll workers, individual voters, and some election officials have been officially reprimanded by the State Election Board for their errors and rules violations. The State Election Board has referred many rules violations to Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and local district attorneys for possible prosecution. But that’s not enough for the movement: its members want to see people in prison for what they did in 2020, which often amounts to technical errors that were mostly violations of Georgia election rules, as well as some laws.
Those violations were largely the result of the chaos of the pandemic and its effect on election administration. Every claim in the affidavit comes down to human error — double-counted ballots, chain of custody failures, missing ballot images. The affidavit does not contain any of the more conspiratorial claims that election deniers have toyed with over the years, things like the Venezuelan government or Italian spies flipping votes on hacked voting machines. (This makes the presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the Jan. 28 FBI raid even more curious, considering her office mostly deals with foreign threats, of which this affidavit mentions none.)
Instead, the affidavit and the witnesses it relies on — who are all avowed Trump supporters and election deniers — simply points out some of the many human errors that occurred in 2020. Now, this same group of election denial activists and their allies in state government would like to implement policies that will cause more of those errors.
Hand-counted ballots and November chaos
The Georgia legislature has until July 1 to create an entirely new ballot system for elections. These new ballots are prohibited by law from using QR codes to help tabulate votes. It’s unclear exactly what will happen if state lawmakers fail to create a new ballot system by July 1, but one possibility is that election workers in all of Georgia’s 159 counties will have to hand count ballots in November’s election.
As many as six million people could vote in November, meaning the same number of ballots will have to be counted by hand.
For years, hand-counted paper ballots have been at the top of the list of priorities for Georgia’s election denial movement. In the U.S., hand counting election results has never been employed on a mass scale. In places where hand counts have been implemented, the results were rife with errors.
Republicans in Nye County, Nevada implemented a hand count of election results in 2022. Officials there admitted the count initially came back with a 25 percent error rate. Election deniers in Nye County tried to implement hand counting in 2024 but were rebuffed by even some Republican county officials.
In Spalding County, Georgia, election deniers serving on the county election board implemented a secondary hand count to check the count conducted by voting machines during an election in 2024. Among the 7,000 votes in that election, the only tabulation errors that were found came from the hand count — not the machines, I previously reported for American Doom.
Still, election deniers have pressed on, demanding a complete end to the use of voting machines. In his first months in office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order demanding the same. The provisions of the order have not been implemented by any state.
The backup plan, if there is one, for Georgia’s election in November comes from a legislative panel that met over the span of several months last summer to discuss election issues. Among the recommendations from the panel is that any ballots utilizing QR codes must also be counted by hand.
That means that if the legislature is unable to come up with a replacement ballot system, all of Georgia’s votes in the November elections must be counted by hand. If election deniers thought there were errors in 2020, wait’ll they see how many errors there are in November.
***
Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?
Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social
TikTok - @americandoom_
YouTube - @americandoom_
Instagram - @americandoom_
X - @americandoom_
Lord have mercy!