An FBI press officer approaches the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center in metro Atlanta on January 28, 2026.Arvin Temka/AP
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While the country was still reeling on Wednesday from the killing of two Americans by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, the Trump administration undertook one of its most blatantly authoritarian actions yet, deploying the FBI to seize ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, a heavily blue area in metro Atlanta that has been an epicenter of the president’s conspiracy theories about the election he lost. “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump vowed in Davos last week. Fulton County appears to be the newest victim of Trump’s long-running retribution campaign.
The raid was as much about the next election as the one six years ago. The capture of ballots in a large urban county in a key swing state is exactly what Trump contemplated when he tried to overturn the 2020 election—federalizing the National Guard to seize voting machines, something he now says he regrets not doing—and sets a chilling precedent for how his administration might interfere in the midterms should Republicans lose the House, Senate, or key state races.
“If people are afraid to leave their homes to go to work or school or get groceries, they’re definitely going to be afraid to leave their homes to vote.”
“The administration is using Fulton County as a blueprint to see what they can get away with elsewhere,” said Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, a pro-democracy group. “If they’re allowed to take ballots here, then what would stop them from seizing ballots or voting machines in any future election in a county or state where their preferred candidates lose?”
In the past week, the different tactics the administration could use to interfere in the midterms have come into sharp focus. The Fulton County raid came just days after Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded that Minnesota hand over its full, unredacted voter roll to the Department of Justice as a way to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” which Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon denounced as “an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.”
On the multiple fronts, the administration is weaponizing the power of law enforcement, from the FBI to ICE to the DOJ, to target blue states and counties and coerce them into taking actions that benefit the administration and punish those who don’t comply.
“To make release of the voter rolls a condition for ICE withdrawing from the state in Minnesota demonstrates this is really about power and control,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told me on Thursday. “The federal government is trying to impose its will on the states. It signals what they’ve already indicated, which is they want more control over the 2026 election.”
Bellows has experienced the administration’s strong-arm tactics firsthand. Maine was one of the first states the DOJ sued to demand access to its full, unredacted voter roll, which Bellows has strenuously refused to turn over. More recently, ICE launched a large-scale operation in the state last week, which led to more than 200 arrests. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who faces a tough re-election this year, claimed on Thursday that ICE had “ceased its enhanced operations” in the state.
“A cynical view of why they’ve exited Maine is concerns that the backlash might topple Susan Collins and cost them a majority in the US Senate,” Bellows responded.
She described the ICE raids in the state as “violent and chaotic” and said she worried that ICE operations targeting blue states could depress voter turnout in November. “If people are afraid to leave their homes to go to work or school or get groceries, they’re definitely going to be afraid to leave their homes to vote,” Bellows said.
She noted that Maine has a special election for the state House of Representatives underway right now in Lewiston, which has a sizeable Somali community that has been targeted by ICE, and has been urging people that are afraid to go to the polls to cast absentee ballots instead.
Bellows sees a connection between the DOJ’s demands for state voter rolls, ICE operations in Minnesota and Maine, and the seizure of ballots in Fulton County.
“They seem intent on trying to influence the outcome of 2026,” she says, “because they fear accountability by the voters.”
