The FBI said it has “substantiated” irregularities in how votes were tabulated after the 2020 presidential election in Fulton County, Georgia, according to an FBI official’s search warrant affidavit that a court unsealed on Feb. 10.

President Donald Trump has long argued that election improprieties in the state contributed to his loss in Georgia in the 2020 presidential election. Last month, when discussing the 2020 election, Trump said that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” but did not elaborate.

The FBI affidavit attached to the search warrant application provides the first public justification for the FBI’s Jan. 28 search at the Fulton County Election Hub in Fairburn, Georgia, outside Atlanta. Roughly 700 boxes of material related to the election were carted away by the FBI as part of its investigation.

The FBI filed the affidavit with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia after U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee directed the federal government to file warrant-related material with the court by Feb. 10.

Boulee made the order in response to a motion filed by Robb Pitts, chairman of the Fulton County board of commissioners, that sought the return of the seized election materials.

The affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans provides an inventory of items he alleged were related to violations of Section 20701 and 20511 of Title 52 of the U.S. Code that took place after Oct. 12, 2020. Election Day that year was Nov. 3.

Section 20511 says that anyone who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process” by casting or tabulating “ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held,” may be imprisoned up to five years.

Section 20701 requires election officials to retain federal election records. Violation of the provision is a misdemeanor.

Evans said in his affidavit that the FBI wanted to seize all physical ballots from the election in the county, all tabulator tapes from every voting machine, all ballot images created from ballot scanning, and all voter rolls.

Evans said after the election there were many allegations of electoral improprieties in the county.

“Some of those allegations have been disproven while some of those allegations have been substantiated, including through admissions by Fulton County,” he said. “This warrant application is part of an FBI criminal investigation into whether any of the improprieties were intentional acts that violated federal criminal laws.”

Evans said the county has admitted it does not possess scanned images of all 528,777 ballots counted during the original count, or of the 527,925 ballots counted during the recount.

The county has confirmed that during the recount, some ballots were scanned multiple times, and that during an audit, the tallies for batches did not match the actual votes within the batches, he said.

Evans said that on the day of the deadline to report recount results, the county reported a recount total of 511,343 ballots, which was 17,434 ballots fewer than originally counted. The next day the county reported that a total of 527,925 ballots were counted, he added.

If the deficiencies alleged in the affidavit “were the result of intentional action” the election records identified in the affidavit are evidence of violations of Sections 20511 and 20701, he said.

“Seizure of the election records would corroborate the analysis that evinces that election records were destroyed and or the tabulation of votes included materially false votes, either through duplicated scanning of specific ballots, interjection of pristine ballots, or other methods described above,” Evans said.

In the affidavit sworn on Jan. 28, Evans asked the court to seal the affidavit and warrant for the time being “because their premature disclosure may seriously jeopardize that investigation, including by giving targets an opportunity to destroy or tamper with evidence, change patterns of behavior, notify confederates, and flee from prosecution.”

In December 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against Fulton County, seeking voting records from the 2020 election.

​​The case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis alleging that Trump and 18 others participated in an unlawful scheme to overturn the 2020 election results was dismissed by a Georgia court in November 2025.

The FBI’s field office in Atlanta declined comment when approached by The Epoch Times.

The Epoch Times also reached out to Pitts for comment. No reply was received by publication time.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Feb. 10, 2026, in The Epoch Times.