Fulton County, Georgia, recently made an admission that should have commanded national attention. During a hearing before the Georgia State Election Board, county officials acknowledged that approximately 315,000 early ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election were unlawfully certified yet were nonetheless included in Georgia’s final, official results, in a race Joe Biden was officially declared to have won by just 11,779 votes.
The admission arose from a challenge filed by David Cross, an election integrity activist, who alleged that Fulton County violated Georgia election law in its handling of early voting. Under state statute, each ballot scanner is required to produce tabulation tapes at the close of voting, and poll workers must sign those tapes to certify the reported totals. These signed tapes are not merely an administrative safeguard. They are central to determining whether the vote count itself is legitimate.
The tapes certify that each machine began the day at zero, that no residual data from prior elections or test runs remained on the memory cards, and that the final totals were fixed the moment voting closed. Without signed tabulation tapes, there is no verifiable starting point and no verifiable endpoint. In legal terms, there is no verified election result. Yet in Fulton County, hundreds of thousands of early votes that were never lawfully certified were still included in the official totals.
Once Fulton County transmitted its early voting totals to the state, the responsibility shifted to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He had a duty to ensure the results were properly certified and above board. Yet his office accepted Fulton County’s numbers on trust and included them in Georgia’s official results without verifying that the required procedures had been followed. This is especially important in light of the events that followed the 2020 election, particularly President Trump’s challenge to Raffensperger.
On Jan. 2, 2021, Trump called Raffensperger to discuss the irregularities in Fulton County, mentioning the county no fewer than 14 times during the call and stating flatly that it was “totally corrupt.” Trump cited estimates of “250 to 300,000 ballots” that had been “dropped mysteriously into the rolls,” repeatedly noting that Fulton County had never been “checked.” In light of what has now been formally admitted, those claims read less like hyperbole and more like an uncannily accurate description of what actually occurred.
Rather than taking those concerns seriously as questions of whether the law had actually been followed, Raffensperger dismissed them outright, insisting that “we do have an accurate election.” What he did not disclose was that his chief of staff, Jordan Fuchs, was secretly recording the conversation in violation of the law, as The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway reported last year. Immediately after the call, Fuchs leaked the tape to The Washington Post, where, the very next day, it was selectively framed to create the now-infamous narrative that Trump had pressured Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.”
That framing inverted the substance of the exchange. Trump’s point was not that votes should be manufactured but that since he was asserting large-scale illegality, identifying 11,780 unlawful votes, the margin of Biden’s supposed win, should have been straightforward. Raffensperger’s leaked phone call, however, proved politically effective. Within days, following the events of Jan. 6, the selectively edited conversation became a central exhibit in the broader effort to portray Trump as having attempted to criminally overturn the election, rather than as challenging what was in fact an election that had been illegally certified.
Years later, with Fulton County now conceding that hundreds of thousands of ballots were never lawfully certified, the episode takes on a very different light. Trump was not inventing problems out of thin air. He was pointing, imperfectly but insistently, to a fundamental failure to follow even the most basic rules of how elections are conducted. The consequences, however, fell entirely on the wrong person. Trump was denounced for questioning the election, accused of undermining democracy, and subjected to years of investigation and prosecution for stating what was true: that legal requirements for certifying hundreds of thousands of votes had been fundamentally violated.
But even as the man accused of attacking democracy for questioning the process has now been vindicated on a central factual point, the people and institutions that failed to follow the law have faced no consequences.
The fact that President Trump ultimately won reelection does not undo what was done in Georgia. Accountability is not contingent on electoral reversal. It is contingent on whether the law still binds those who administer elections, and whether violations of that law still matter once the political moment has passed.
If nothing comes of Fulton County’s admission, the implication will be that election laws can be treated as optional rather than binding. Lawful certification will remain a matter of convenience instead of necessity. Future officials will understand that essential checks on the integrity of the vote can be ignored so long as the results are politically convenient.
Even more troubling, inaction would validate a deeper inversion of responsibility. The individual who raised concerns was punished, while the institutions that failed to follow the law remain protected.
Cross, whose persistence brought these revelations to light, has asked the State Election Board to decertify Fulton County’s 2020 advanced voting results for the historical record. His request is not aimed at changing past outcomes. We cannot undo the fact that for four years Joe Biden was president. But an official acknowledgment that Fulton County’s vote certification, and by extension the Georgia outcome, was invalid would place a permanent mark on the deliberate misconduct of those responsible and the institutional failure that enabled it, while reinforcing the principle that election law is not optional.
If the State Election Board declines to act, this episode may quietly fade from memory, leaving nothing to prevent it from happening again. Democracies do not fail when rules are broken. They fail when no one is held accountable.
