Some things you should know about Fulton County, Georgia
On Wednesday, FBI investigators executed a search warrant targeting the headquarters of the Fulton County, Georgia elections department. The warrant, obtained by ProPublica, sought physical ballots and election records from the state’s 2020 election.
I happen to have just written about how President Trump and his allies are attempting to relitigate the 2020 outcome with an eye toward testing systems in advance of 2026 and 2028, so I won’t regurgitate that here. Instead what I will do is revisit one of the more frustrating periods of my professional life, when, on what seemed like a daily basis, I spent my time debunking conspiracy theories about the results of the election Trump lost.
Many of which were centered in Fulton County and its primary city, Atlanta.
Trump and his allies targeted Georgia with conspiracy theories incessantly, mostly because the margin in the state was narrow enough that tossing out 12,000 Joe Biden ballots could have handed Trump a victory. This isn’t speculation on my part; you may recall that Trump was recorded trying to browbeat Georgia’s secretary of state into flipping the Georgia results.
There was even a brief flurry of action in December 2020 when Trump ousted Attorney General Bill Barr (in part because Barr admitted there was no evidence of fraud) and entertained replacing him with Jeff Clark, who dutifully cobbled together an official letter from the government telling Georgia that its results were suspect. Cooler heads prevailed, at least until the first week of January.
This time around, there are no cooler heads running the Department of Justice or the FBI. So it is up to me, it seems, to remind everyone of how we can be so confident that there was no significant fraud in Georgia in the election five years ago.
Again, a lot of what you might hear about Fulton County has not only been debunked but was debunked even before Trump left office the first time around. The thing about a water main break? About poll workers pulling secret ballots out from under a table? Neither of those things was an example of fraud — or even particularly interesting. They were simply Unusual Things That Happened™, and so were tasked by Trump’s allies with the important work of Raising Suspicions™. That’s all Trump ever really wanted to do, get enough people to think, hmmm that’s odd, that they wouldn’t mind if Georgia’s election totals were thrown out.
More than five years ago, state officials refuted Trump’s claims about fraud in the state.
It’s important to recognize that these lies were not victimless. Two women, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, became the faces of alleged fraud in Fulton County (in no small part because they were Black women), including in a series of false claims from Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani. But the state cleared them of any wrongdoing and Giuliani withdrew his allegations and was ordered to pay more than $140 million in damages.
Fulton County, like every county in Georgia, used Dominion voting machines in the 2020 election. This meant that an automatic machine recount was completed fairly quickly. There was also an additional recount conducted by hand; neither changed the results significantly. And what those results show is that Fulton County did shift to the Democratic candidate between 2016 and 2020 — but so did 84 other of Georgia’s 159 counties.
In fact, Fulton County swung left less than most of the counties that surrounded it. It was a focus primarily because there were a lot of votes cast for Joe Biden there, not because there was an unusual number of votes cast for him.
On average, Georgia counties saw 5.6 percent more votes cast in 2020 than in 2016. In Fulton, the increase was only 2.2 percent, ranking it 102nd out of 159 in terms of turnout growth.
In other words, if Fulton County was a hotbed of fraud, it was amateur hour compared to all the other counties around it.
That Georgia used Dominion machines, though, meant that it (and Fulton County) got smeared with the conspiratorial idea that machines had been rigged to give the election to Biden. An analysis I completed in December 2020, though, showed that most swing-state counties that used Dominion machines still voted for Donald Trump.
In fact, more counties that didn’t use Dominion machines flipped from Trump to Biden than did counties where the machines were in use.
Over time, more allegations about Fulton County emerged. Tucker Carlson, then still at Fox News, elevated a claim that ballots in the county had been counted more than once, inflating Biden’s totals. Carlson told a tale of a warehouse alarm being tripped and a mysteriously open door — a story that ended up being about an employee accidentally being locked in the building after using the restroom. There’s no evidence votes were counted more than once, as evidenced by the fact that those votes were counted two more times in the recounts and the totals didn’t change to a significant degree.
Then there was Dinesh D’Souza’s movie “2000 Mules.” D’Souza claimed that rampant illegal voting had occurred when people hired to collect ballots stuffed them into drop boxes. From the moment the movie was released, it was obvious that D’Souza had no evidence of drop boxes being stuffed, much less this happening as part of a grand conspiracy, much less that there was a discernible number of votes cast, much less that those votes were illegal. In time, D’Souza too was forced to admit that his movie didn’t show what he claimed it did.
None of this is to say that Fulton County’s handling of 2020 was flawless. The slow counting that occurred kept the door open for Trump and his allies to suggest that something untoward was occurring. The man in charge of elections in the county was ousted in February 2021.
But administrative clumsiness is not fraud. It is not close to fraud. And nothing remotely close to fraud has been identified in five-plus years of feverish searching by the president and his allies.
So what do we make of the FBI search that unfolded on Wednesday? Well, we should look at it in the context of Trump’s past efforts to use claims of fraud to secure power despite election results. And we should recognize it as, if nothing else, an effort to degrade trust in elections systems. Remember when he was impeached for trying to get Ukraine to launch an investigation of Joe Biden before the 2020 contest? He and his team knew that the investigation itself would raise suspicions, even if nothing was ever proven (or even surfaced). Here, too, the investigation is itself part of the effort to shape perceptions.
Here’s what we can expect to happen next. It will probably be the case that the seized information will yield some new allegation, just as Trump and his allies gaining access to other federal information led them to make fresh, dubious claims about old, settled issues.
And we can assume that when no smoking gun of 2020 election fraud emerges, as it almost certainly won’t, Trump supporters won’t view that as a repudiation of their shared belief in wrongdoing. It will, instead, simply be treated as proof that the fraud was so significant that records were destroyed before Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel could get to them.
Leading them to advocate strongly for changes making it harder for “fraud” to occur — changes that will invariably make it harder for Democrats to win or to have their victories certified.
Did I forget any debunked Fulton County conspiracy theories? Email me.
Photo: Trump talks with Pence in the Oval Office before heading to Senate campaign rallies in Georgia, Jan. 4, 2021. (White House/Flickr)