For years, the political class insisted that every question about Georgia’s 2020 election was baseless — irresponsible at best, dangerous at worst. But this month, something extraordinary happened: Fulton County quietly admitted that more than 300,000 early votes were counted without the legally required certification.
Days later, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit demanding access to the county’s sealed 2020 ballots, citing “unexplained anomalies” it says cannot be ignored. Suddenly, the narrative that Georgia’s election was beyond reproach is colliding with the record. And the implications stretch far beyond Fulton County.
During a December 9 hearing before the Georgia State Election Board, Fulton County attorney Ann Brumbaugh conceded that approximately 315,000 early votes in 2020 were counted even though the legally required certification signatures on tabulator tapes were never completed.
“We don’t dispute that the tapes were not signed,” Brumbaugh told the Board, admitting an explicit violation of Georgia election law.
That admission aligns with the conclusion of a 2024 investigation by Georgia’s Secretary of State, which determined that 36 of 37 Fulton County early-voting precincts failed to sign their tabulator tapes, and that many failed to sign their required “zero tapes” verifying machines began at zero. These tapes are the only statutory certification that vote totals are authentic. Without them, the law provides no authorization to certify the results. Yet Fulton County certified the totals anyway, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger accepted them.
The Justice Department has thus filed lawsuit against four states for failing to produce validation of its voter rolls.
“The law is clear: states need to give us this information, so we can do our duty to protect American citizens from vote dilution,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Today’s filings show that regardless of which party is in charge of a particular state, the Department of Justice will firmly stand on the side of election integrity and transparency.”
The scale of the irregularities in Georgia was brought to light by election-integrity researcher David Cross, who paid nearly $16,000 for Fulton County’s records. Cross found 134 tabulator tapes — representing roughly 315,000 early votes — with completely blank signature fields.
He also uncovered duplicate scanner serial numbers, mismatched memory cards, and precincts reporting operating hours as late as 2:09 a.m., all documented in the materials he presented to the State Election Board. As he told the Board: “Because no tape was ever legally certified, Fulton County had no lawful authority to certify its advanced voting results to the Secretary of State. Yet it did. And Secretary Raffensperger accepted and folded those uncertified numbers into Georgia’s official total.”
These findings compound earlier issues. In 2024, Georgia’s State Election Board issued a reprimand after determining that Fulton County had double-counted at least 3,075 ballots in the 2020 recount and could not determine how many duplicate ballots may have been included in the certified total. Investigators said they could not reconstruct chain-of-custody records for a significant number of ballot images and conceded that some underlying records were missing entirely.
Despite this, the state certified the results, and the county avoided a referral to the Attorney General by agreeing to pre-2024 election monitoring. In other words, it is now acknowledged that it is valid to accuse the State of Georgia of wrongfully awarding Joe Biden the state’s 16 electoral college votes in the 2020 election.
The margin of illegitimate “victory”? 11,779 votes. Well within the margin of disputed votes according to the early votes illegally tabulated in Fulton County alone.
Questions about the 2020 election are now being raised not only by private citizens but by the federal government. The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit this month against Fulton County officials for refusing to produce ballots, ballot stubs, signature envelopes, and digital envelope files from the 2020 election after what federal officials described as “unexplained anomalies in vote tabulation.” The DOJ stated that Fulton County’s refusal to release these records violates federal law and has requested a court order compelling production within five days.
“Section 301 of the CRA requires state and local officials to retain and preserve records related to voter registration and other acts requisite to voting for any federal office for a period of twenty-two months after any federal general, special or primary election,” the lawsuit states.
“In the Fulton Clerk Letter, the Fulton Clerk stated that the records sought are under seal and may not be produced absent a Court Order,” the complaint adds. “On November 21, 2025, the Attorney General sent a letter to the Fulton Clerk (‘November 21 Letter’) requesting the documents on the same grounds. That letter restated the Attorney General’s request under the same authorities and purposes. The October 30 Letter and November 14 Letter were attached for reference.”
Taken together, these developments undermine a central premise of former Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s RICO case against President Trump — namely, that Trump’s objections to the Georgia election were knowingly false. Willis charged Trump and his co-defendants on the theory that raising concerns about the 2020 results constituted criminal racketeering because “there was no lawful basis” to question the election. But the factual landscape has now shifted. Fulton County’s own admissions establish that the county failed to comply with core certification procedures mandated by state law.
The Secretary of State’s office has confirmed these failures. And the DOJ’s new lawsuit identifies additional irregularities that warrant federal investigation.
In that context, objections raised in 2020 — including demands for audits, verification of signatures, confirmation of machine start totals, and reviews of chain-of-custody documentation — fall squarely within the rights of any candidate, particularly one in a race decided by fewer than 12,000 votes.
Legal analysts have noted that the Willis prosecution relied heavily on asserting that Trump had “no evidence” and “no reasonable basis” to question the results. That argument becomes increasingly difficult to maintain when Fulton County itself now agrees that it violated the law, state investigators substantiate those violations, and the federal government is suing to uncover further irregularities.
If the official record shows statutory noncompliance on a scale of hundreds of thousands of ballots, the criminal assertion that it was unlawful to object to those irregularities becomes considerably weaker.
What is emerging is not a partisan narrative but a factual one: the 2020 election in Georgia did not follow the procedures required by law, and those deviations were material, documented, and now admitted.
Now comes the critical part: Restitution for those who were wronged by the election process and accountability for those who were complicit in the malfeasance.
