ATLANTA — An election security expert testified Friday that the claims the FBI cited to justify its recent seizure of 2020 election ballots from Georgia’s most populous county had “no basis in reality” and fundamentally misunderstood how elections work.
Ryan Macias, the former acting director of the testing and certification program of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, told a federal judge that what agents described as potentially criminal irregularities in how Fulton County tabulated its votes were actually the type of routine errors that occur in almost every election — and had no bearing on the outcome of the vote.
He faulted agents for relying on statements from conspiracy theorists, known election deniers and Republican state officials, while giving only cursory mention to multiple audits and state investigations that have looked at many of the same issues and found no evidence of intentional wrongdoing.
“There’s no basis in reality for most of the witness statements,” Macias, who worked as a consultant for Fulton County during the 2020 vote, told U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee during a hearing in federal court in Atlanta. “The information [that] was relied on doesn’t reflect reality, what actually happened.”
Macias’s testimony came as Fulton County officials urged the judge to order the return of more than 650 boxes of election materials seized during a January raid.
They accuse the FBI of misleading a federal court magistrate into approving a warrant authorizing the seizure, and they have denounced the Justice Department’s investigation as a misguided attempt to substantiate President Donald Trump’s baseless grievances about his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
Boulee did not issue a ruling on the county’s request by the end of Friday’s hearing. But Justice Department lawyers urged him to reject it, accusing the county of using its push for the ballots’ return to launch a backdoor referendum on the merits of their investigation.
“It seems like that they just don’t like the vibe of what’s happening,” said Michael Weisbuch, a senior Justice Department counsel. “That’s not a constitutional claim.”
Friday’s hearing marked the first time since the FBI’s January raid on the county’s primary election warehouse and the office of its clerk of courts that department officials had to publicly address questions about their probe.
In a sign of how seriously the top Justice officials were taking the county’s challenge, Tysen Duva, the head of the department’s criminal division, accompanied Weisbuch and other prosecutors to the proceedings.
Duva noted that the FBI had already provided Fulton County officials with digital copies of all of the seized ballots. County officials maintain that they need the originals to ensure their integrity amid continued efforts to delegitimize their 2020 results.
The seizure of voting materials has stoked alarm among election officials and democracy advocates across the country, who note that several audits, nearly a dozen court rulings and Trump’s former attorney general, William P. Barr, have previously concluded there was no evidence of widespread fraud sufficient to affect the outcome of the 2020 race in Georgia, which multiple counts have shown that Trump lost by about 12,000 votes.
Biden’s win in Georgia was not necessary for his victory; he won the electoral college by 306-232, a 74-point margin, and Georgia has 16 electoral votes.
Despite that, Fulton County has remained a persistent target for conspiracy theorists spurred by Trump’s continued fixation on the 2020 outcome. Discrediting the county could help the president’s years-long effort to undermine confidence in the 2020 vote and election integrity more broadly.
In recent months, the Justice Department has also launched an inquiry into Arizona’s 2020 results. Trump, meanwhile, has continued to demand that Republicans “nationalize elections,”imposing voter ID requirements, banning voting machines and eliminating mail-in voting in states across the country.
“A week doesn’t go by that one in this administration doesn’t make an allegation of fraud, and that extends, unfortunately, to the president himself,” said Abbe Lowell as he represented the county in court. “They could come through hundreds, if not thousands, of election locations across the country and seize all the ballots.”
The Georgia inquiry was initiated by a referral from former Trump campaign lawyer and prominent election denier Kurt Olsen, who has twice been reprimanded by courts for lying about election-related issues. He was recently named to a White House post tasked with monitoring election integrity.
Lawyers for Fulton County have called the seizure of its 2020 election materials, and the warrant that authorized it, “unprecedented in American history.”
To prevail in their request for the ballots’ return, the county must prove that the FBI showed a “callous disregard” for constitutional protections and that the search was unreasonable because there was no probable cause to suggest a crime occurred.
The affidavit the FBI submitted to obtain the warrant said authorities sought evidence to determine whether “deficiencies” in Fulton County’s 2020 vote tabulation were the result of intentional wrongdoing that could constitute a crime.
It relied on accounts from 11 people — many of whom are prominent election deniers or members of Georgia’s Republican-controlled State Election Board — to suggest that “unknown persons” may have sought to tamper with the county’s 2020 results.
Macias sought in his more than an hour of testimony Friday to deflate what agents had flagged as suspicious.
Federal officials, for instance, have noted that Fulton County no longer has scanned images of all 528,777 ballots cast in the 2020 race, suggesting that is evidence of possible tampering. But Macias dismissed that as insignificant, given that the county still has original paper versions of those ballots.
An FBI affidavit also suggested that the county may have scanned more than 3,000 ballots twice during a recount of the 2020 vote. But previous state investigations have produced no evidence that those double scans meant the ballots were actually counted twice. Even if they were, those earlier probes concluded, the outcome would have benefited Trump.
Macias also questioned the FBI’s claim that the county, during a recount of the 2020 vote, first reported a vote total that was roughly 17,000 ballots short of what it had reported in its original count, then ultimately replaced it with a figure that matched the first tabulation of roughly 530,000 ballots.
The lower total was actually a mid-count update that was never circulated externally, Macias said.
“These are common things in the election world that would happen every day,” Lowell said, as he questioned the witness. “And the magistrate judge … should have been told that.”
In obtaining their warrant, federal authorities were not required to prove any of the claims they laid out as the basis for their search. Instead, they had only to convince a judge that there was a substantial likelihood a crime had occurred. In approving their request earlier this year, U.S. Magistrate Judge Catherine M. Salinas determined that investigators had met that threshold.
Duva on Friday rejected the suggestion that agents had somehow misled her.
He noted that despite relying on statements from witnesses skeptical of the election’s integrity, the agent who authored the search warrant affidavit also repeatedly cited audits and investigations that found no evidence of wrongdoing. The magistrate judge, Duva noted, authorized the search warrant anyway.
“If the agent was intentionally trying to mislead or misdirect,” Duva said, “why would you write something that would take away from your probable cause?”
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