I’m one of the most counted people in the United States, and maybe you are too. I’m a registered voter in Fulton County.
My vote in the 2020 presidential election was mechanically counted on Election Night, then hand-counted in the mandatory audit required by law when the statewide margin is less than 0.5 percent. At the request of the Trump campaign, my vote was again mechanically tabulated in a statewide recount. If I understand the procedure correctly, it was tabulated again by the county when it produced a summary report in 2022.
Judge Robert McBurney has already cleared the way for the State Election Board to count my vote again if it wishes, and in a hearing before his court next week the county was prepared to turn over all the 2020 election records, including my vote, that the board was demanding. So I was about to be counted again.
This long chain was broken last Wednesday, when FBI agents acting on a warrant signed by Thomas Albus, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, executed a pre-arranged raid on the county elections office and warehouse in Union City. They removed a huge cache of election material. My vote was somewhere in it. So I can not say, with any confidence, that it will ever be counted again.
The following day, national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard got President Donald Trump on the phone with some of the agents who’d participated in the raid for a sort of pep talk. It has since been learned that Trump ordered Gabbard to go on the raid, where she attracted lots of notice.
Later, on the Dan Bongino show, Trump said Democrats cheat, and Republicans should nationalize the voting “in at least — many, maybe 15 places.”
So we have a very clear idea what’s ahead for Fulton County, and lots will be said about it. But to return to the original subject, what about my vote?
It’s a little vague, but my 2020 ballot, the physical embodiment of my vote, appears to have been transported to an FBI facility in Virginia, which could become a clearing house for a much wider probe. But when an orderly and entirely legal process was interrupted by the seizure and removal of the evidence, my vote — well, it didn’t vanish, but there is no longer a reliable way to locate it. Fulton County Commission Chairman Rob Pitts put this very well.
“We can no longer, and I can no longer, as the chair of this board, satisfy not only the citizens of Atlanta but the citizens of the world that those ballots are still secure,” Pitts said.
The special agent in charge of the Atlanta FBI office is reported to have been removed from his position the week because he raised questions about the investigation. The Sunday New York Times magazine last weekend featured a story on the FBI under Kash Patel, headlined by a quote from a veteran agent: “Vendetta is the best word for what they’re doing.”
One of the peculiar things about Trump’s years-long obsession with the 2020 vote in Georgia is that it wasn’t crucial in any way to the outcome that year. If Georgia’s 16 electoral votes had gone to Trump, Joe Biden would have won the electoral college vote by a margin of 290-248. This has never really been about the numbers.
What we seem likely to discover, as we learn more about the 15 places where Trump wants voting nationalized, is that this has less to do with electoral votes than racial composition. In retrospect it seems inevitable that Fulton County would become the epicenter of this bitter search for retribution.
Meanwhile, we’re a few months away from an election. Wonder what the turnout in Fulton County is going to be?
