Justice department allegedly investigating debunked 2020 Georgia election fraud claims

Members of Georgia’s election denial movement have claimed in recent weeks that the justice department is investigating debunked fraud claims in the state stemming from the 2020 election.

The development would be just the latest in a series of moves by Trump acolytes at the DoJ who are transforming the voting section of the agency from an office focused on protecting Americans’ voting rights to one that is in lockstep with an election denial movement that incessantly demands investigations and drastic reductions in access to the polls based on Donald Trump’s lies about elections.

On 2 October, Republicans from the Georgia legislature invited several election deniers to speak at a hearing designed to help lawmakers decide whether to end the state’s membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, an organization that helps election officials remove ineligible voters from voter rolls.

Among those invited was Mark Davis, a political consultant and frequent voter registration challenger. Davis’s presentation was titled “Felony Residency Violations”, and alleged that hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters may have voted illegally in recent elections because they had moved, but had voted in their former jurisdictions.

“On September 10th, I received a call from an investigator with the Department of Justice about these specific violations,” Davis claimed.

Davis nor the justice department responded to requests for comment.

Davis said he had submitted formal complaints about 97 voters to the Georgia secretary of state’s office, adding that they should be investigated for possible violations of the federal Voting Rights Act. His alleged conversation with the justice department “makes these issues even more important”, he said at the hearing.

Davis’s revelation marked the second time in recent months that election deniers had claimed the justice department was investigating unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. At the heart of their claims is a 25 August letter from Ed Martin, who defended January 6 rioters and has since been appointed by Trump as an attorney at the DoJ. In the letter, Martin demanded “immediate access” to 148,000 ballots and ballot envelopes from the 2020 election that the state’s election denial movement believes will prove their false claims of a stolen election that year.

The letter – whose authenticity the Guardian has not been able to independently verify – was allegedly sent to the judge Robert CI McBurney, who has overseen election-related cases in Georgia. McBurney did not respond to a request for comment; nor did Martin. But on 29 October, Martin posted an emoji denoting intrigue when the letter was posted on X by Cleta Mitchell, head of the Election Integrity Network and one of the nation’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists.

“I am requesting your permission to immediately access the approximately 148,000 absentee ballots and envelopes currently being held at the Fulton County ballot warehouse,” Martin wrote in the letter, which has only been shared publicly by Mitchell and an anonymous, far-right X account. “I am at present undertaking an investigation into election integrity here at the Department of Justice. A review of the ballots and envelopes is imperative for this work.”

The letter also states that a copy would be sent to the office of Ché Alexander, clerk of the Fulton county superior court. Alexander’s office said it had not received the letter.

Martin’s supposed investigation into 2020 election fraud claims offers more evidence that Trump’s justice department is working hand-in-hand with the election denial movement, said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a Georgia-based progressive voting rights advocacy organization.

“Trump’s DOJ is actively working with the same crackpots who tried to overturn his 2020 loss,” Flugrath said in a statement. “Investigators are reaching out to discredited activists and partisan operatives to advance bogus claims of fraud.”

The voting section of the justice department’s civil rights division has taken the lead in pursuing Trump’s lies about election fraud, demanding lists of voters and their personal information from more than 30 states. The DoJ’s potential involvement in unfounded fraud investigations represents a new front in the Trump administration’s pursuit of fraud claims headed into next year’s midterm elections.

On 15 October, Donald Trump himself appeared to reference those very ballots in remarks to reporters, falsely claiming that he won the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

“I hope they go into the votes which are being stored in Fulton county and take a real look at those votes, because I won it the second time too,” Trump said.

To gain access to full voter registration lists, or “VRLs”, the DoJ has sued seven states, prompting voting rights groups to warn that the Trump administration is helping states to purge hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of Americans from voter rolls heading into next year’s elections.

In Texas, the Trump administration’s use of social security and justice department databases has resulted in claims that more than 2,000 voters are non-citizens, who are ineligible to vote in federal elections. A county election official there warned in a 29 October court filing that, in one county, more than a quarter of those identified as noncitizens had already proved their citizenship.

The official warned that the use of the databases to identify possible noncitizens could result in large numbers of eligible voters having their ability to vote “improperly cancelled”. After being identified as possible noncitizens by Texas’s Republican secretary of state, 2,724 voters have begun receiving notices that they could have their ability to vote revoked, “in some cases with minimal apparent verification by counties of whether the recipients are actually noncitizens”, the county election official said.

Trump’s justice department has demanded unredacted VRLs from at least 30 states, including Georgia. On 7 August, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger received a demand for unredacted VRLs from the justice department’s civil rights division, the Guardian has learned. The letter, which has not been previously reported, also asked Raffensperger’s office to list election officials throughout the state “who are responsible for implementing Georgia’s general program of voter registration list maintenance”.

“Please also provide a description of the steps that you have taken, and when those steps were taken, to ensure that the State’s list maintenance program has been properly carried out in full compliance with the NVRA,” the letter states.

The Trump administration has used language in the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, to claim the federal government should have access to unredacted voter lists.

Raffensperger’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

A month after Martin’s letter, the state election board’s three Trump-supporting Republican members outvoted the lone Democrat to subpoena the same 148,000 ballot envelopes that Martin’s letter demanded. The subpoena is part of the board’s ongoing work with the justice department, said one of the board’s Republican members, Janelle King.

“We sent a letter to the DoJ asking for help, and they are helping,” King said during a 21 October gathering of Republicans in Fannin county. King’s comments have not been previously reported. “Now, you heard President Trump made a comment about Fulton county not too long ago, so that tells me that some stuff is getting up there – they are talking about it. So the plan is, I’m hoping, that the DoJ gets involved, and forces them to hand it over.”

Asked by an election denial activist during her remarks whether the state election board was actively talking to the justice department, King smiled and laughed. “Yes, they’re communicating with us.”

On 30 October, the justice department sent a letter to Fulton county demanding access to “all records in your possession responsive to the subpoena issued to your office by the State Election Board”.

When the Fulton county board of elections met on 7 November to certify the results of the 4 November elections, Republican board member Julie Adams, an election denier who has worked with a variety of conspiracy theorists and organizations tied to Trump, inquired about the 148,000 ballots that are the intense focus of Georgia’s election denial movement.

“I’m asking if we have the ballots from 2020,” Adams said as a fellow board member reminded her that the ballots were in McBurney’s possession as part of an ongoing lawsuit. “I just want to be on the record that I’m not obstructing anything from the SEB or the Department of Justice.”