ATLANTA — Fulton County officials are approaching a deadline to comply with a request for a slew of records related to the 2020 election requested by President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, with resistance.

Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts said the county has complied with the law regarding the 2020 election, and there’s nothing else to be done.

“Why this fixation on 2020?” Pitts said. “God only knows why.”

The Justice Department’s request to reopen inquiries into Fulton’s 2020 election comes ahead of the 2026 midterms and tests whether the Trump administration can compel local election officials to revisit a contest scrutinized by investigators numerous times.

Georgia’s most populous county has been at the center of debunked election fraud allegations for years. And multiple investigations and three recounts have upheld the results.

But election experts say the Justice Department’s recent actions could go beyond relitigating 2020 and might have more to do with undermining confidence in the voting system for future elections.

The president has also pushed for a number of other election-related changes, including redrawn congressional district maps, issuing pardons for allies accused of attempting to overturn the 2020 election results and DOJ requests for statewide voter information.

“The purpose might be less to find anything wrong with the 2020 election than it would be to fuel false claims of stolen future elections,” said David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.

The Oct. 30 letter sent by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon asked the county election board to produce the requested documents within 15 days. She wrote that the department wants to determine whether the county had complied with federal law.

The letter requested all the documents subpoenaed last year by the Republican-controlled State Elections Board, including voter lists, chain-of-custody forms, ballot images, documentation of security seals and ballot scanner paperwork.

The board’s Trump-aligned majority — once praised by Trump as “pit bulls” — sought Justice Department intervention in July.

Those subpoenas are also tied up in court. Court documents filed after the DOJ letter show county officials are continuing to press on with a lawsuit seeking to quash the subpoenas from the state board.

Court filings from Sherri Allen and Fulton Elections Director Nadine Williams argued that the state board lacks the legal authority to relitigate matters it has already resolved. Filings cite the state board’s reprimand of Fulton for double-scanning more than 3,000 ballots during a 2020 recount.

Filings also estimate that searching for the documents requested in the subpoena would cost the county more than $375,000, including the cost of labor and copying documents.

Election records are usually only retained for two years under Georgia law, but Fulton’s 2020 records have been kept because of litigation and state board investigations.

While many elected Republicans have said they want to move on from 2020 after Trump’s 2024 victory, critics continue searching for answers about Fulton’s election. They say there were too many abnormalities in the county’s election and that Fulton should allow records to be inspected if they have nothing to hide.

At a Fulton County Elections Board meeting last week, the only Republican board member, Julie Adams, said that the county should comply with the Justice Department’s request.

“If everything’s right, they’ll just say everything’s right, and it’ll be great,” Adams said.

A clip of an exchange between Adams and Allen during the meeting regarding whether the county still had 2020 records was posted to social media by the founder of the Election Integrity Network, Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who supported efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss.

“Yes!” she wrote on X. “The ballots are preserved and are in the court clerks custody and control!”

But it’s not the only letter a Justice Department official sent to the county since Trump took office this year.

An August letter, reposted online by Ed Martin of the Justice Department, shows he requested access to about 148,000 absentee ballots and envelopes being held by Fulton.

But it’s not clear whether the letter from Martin to Fulton Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney was delivered. Michelle Hansberry, McBurney’s judicial assistant, did not respond to requests for comment about the letter. The letter shows a typo in Hansberry’s email address.

Martin wrote that he would also send a copy to Fulton Clerk of Court Ché Alexander. Alexander wrote in an email to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she does not have it and is unfamiliar with the matter.

While conservative critics of Fulton have sought more information about 2020 for years, the Trump administration’s intervention marks rising tensions over the five-year-old election that could breathe new life into skepticism about Donald Trump’s narrow loss.

Meanwhile, McBurney has scheduled a hearing for later this month to consider whether to quash the subpoenas issued by the Republican-controlled state board.

©2025 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visit at ajc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.