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The U.S. Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against four jurisdictions — the District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, and Wisconsin — for “failure to produce their full voter registration lists upon request.”
“The law is clear: states need to give us this information, so we can do our duty to protect American citizens from vote dilution,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Today’s filings show that regardless of which party is in charge of a particular state, the Department of Justice will firmly stand on the side of election integrity and transparency.”
The lawsuits come on the heels of damning revelations about Georgia’s largest county. Election integrity researcher David Cross uncovered what he described as “systemic noncompliance” after paying nearly $16,000 for Fulton County’s 2020 election records. Cross told the Georgia State Election Board that 134 tabulator tapes—representing roughly 315,000 early votes—were missing required poll worker signatures.
“Because no tape was ever legally certified, Fulton County had no lawful authority to certify its advanced voting results to the Secretary of State. Yet it did,” Cross said. “And Secretary Raffensperger accepted and folded those uncertified numbers into Georgia’s official total.”
The irregularities did not end there. Cross’s review also revealed duplicate scanner serial numbers, mismatched memory cards, and precincts reporting operation hours as late as 2:09 a.m. These findings corroborated a 2024 reprimand by Georgia’s State Election Board, which determined Fulton County had double-counted at least 3,075 ballots in the 2020 recount and could not verify how many duplicates were ultimately included in the final certified total. Investigators admitted that they were missing chain-of-custody records for numerous ballot images and that “some underlying records were lost entirely.”
Despite these findings, state officials proceeded to certify the results. The county escaped a formal referral to the Attorney General by agreeing to pre-2024 monitoring. The upshot: Georgia’s 16 electoral votes were awarded to Joe Biden by a margin of 11,779 votes, well within the range of ballots now under scrutiny.
The Department of Justice’s new lawsuit cites Fulton County’s “unexplained anomalies in vote tabulation” and accuses officials of refusing to produce ballots, stubs, signature envelopes, and digital files from the 2020 election. The department argues that the county’s position violates federal transparency and record-keeping laws.
“Section 301 of the CRA requires state and local officials to retain and preserve records related to voter registration and other acts requisite to voting for any federal office for a period of twenty-two months after any federal election,” the DOJ complaint states. “On November 21, 2025, the Attorney General sent a letter to the Fulton Clerk requesting the documents on the same grounds… that letter restated the Attorney General’s request under the same authorities and purposes.”
Legal analysts say the implications reach far beyond record access. The federal suit directly undermines former Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s now-dismissed RICO prosecution of President Trump and 18 co-defendants. Willis had charged that Trump’s objections to Georgia’s results constituted “criminal racketeering” because “there was no lawful basis” to challenge the outcome.
That claim has since collapsed under the weight of the state’s own admissions and the Justice Department’s findings. The State Election Board confirmed procedural violations, while the DOJ’s filings point to unresolved irregularities that could affect hundreds of thousands of votes.
In short, the factual record does not support the dismissive premise that questioning the 2020 election was “baseless.” On the contrary, both federal and state authorities now concede that Fulton County’s election did not comply with statutory requirements.
“The notion that it was criminal to demand audits, signature verification, or machine checks looks absurd when the evidence shows those very systems broke down,” said one election attorney familiar with the case.
For now, the Justice Department’s suit signals a new phase of reckoning. After years of political division and media dismissal, the federal government itself is now acknowledging that the 2020 election in Georgia did not follow the law.
