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ATLANTA (CN) — The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced a lawsuit Friday seeking copies of Fulton County’s ballots from the 2020 presidential election.
The lawsuit seeks access to all used and void ballots, as well as absentee ballot signature envelopes, digital files and other election records held by the county board of registration and elections.
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, says that Fulton County Superior Court Clerk Ché Alexander violated federal law by failing to produce the requested records.
The challenge follows a July 30 resolution by Georgia’s State Election Board urging the attorney general to enforce “compliance with voting transparency” and ensure access to election records.
In October, the attorney general sent a letter demanding the Fulton County Board produce the records, but Alexander responded that “the records sought are under seal and may not be produced absent a court order.”
The Fulton County Election Board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Trump and several of his allies have long contended that his 2020 election loss stemmed from voter fraud in Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold in the Atlanta area within an otherwise largely Republican state.
Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger later certified Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow statewide victory after a statewide audit and two recounts, including a hand count of nearly 5 million ballots.
Trump’s attorney at the time, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, later faced defamation lawsuits from two Fulton County election workers he falsely accused of pulling illegal ballots from “suitcases” and repeatedly scanning them at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena.
Although election interference and racketeering charges brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis against Trump, Giuliani and others were dismissed last month, Friday’s lawsuit signals the president is not ready to put the 2020 election behind him.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department, Harmeet Dhillon, said in a statement.
“At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will," Dhillon added.
The Justice Department also announced Friday it filed federal lawsuits against four states — Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Nevada. The suits claim the states failed to comply with federal election law and hand over their statewide voter registration lists upon request.
The sought lists include each voter registrant’s full name, date of birth, residential address, and either their state driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.
“We will not hand over Coloradans’ sensitive voting information to Donald Trump. He does not have a legal right to the information,” Colorado’s Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, said in a statement. “I will continue to protect our elections and democracy, and look forward to winning this case,” the Democrat, who’s running for attorney general, added.
The lawsuit against Colorado came a day after Trump announced on social media that he was pardoning Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk serving a nine-year sentence for granting unauthorized access to voting equipment while probing the 2020 election. The pardon is symbolic, however, because presidents lack the authority to pardon state convictions.
The filing brings the Justice Department’s total number of similar lawsuits nationwide to 18. States sued over access to voter registration lists include California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Oregon, Maine and Washington.
Indiana and Wyoming have provided their full statewide voter rolls, while 10 other states have provided only publicly available versions that exclude Social Security and driver’s license numbers.
Voters in two other states, Nebraska and South Carolina, have filed cases in state court to prevent election officials from sharing their private voter information with the Justice Department.
As part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, the voter information is likely to be shared with the Department of Homeland Security in search of noncitizens.
Some states, such as Michigan, Louisiana and Georgia, have already undertaken audits of their entire voter rolls, using resources from the Department of Homeland Security to check for noncitizens, with officials reporting finding cases of noncitizen voting to be extremely rare.
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