ATLANTA —Students in Georgia schools could soon have more opportunities to study outdoors instead of inside a classroom.
The state Senate gave final approval Wednesday to a bill that calls for a pilot program that incorporates outdoor learning spaces at K-8 schools chosen by the state Department of Education.
The vote was unanimous, and the bill now heads to Gov. Brian Kemp after it previously passed the House.
“I was able to benefit greatly from an outdoor classroom at North Habersham Middle School,” said state Sen. Bo Hatchett, R-Cornelia. “Today’s students should also benefit from that same opportunity.”
State Sen. Sheikh Rahman, D-Lawrenceville, said time away from the confines of school buildings will help students.
“Our kids now, they spend so much time on the computer. They don’t go outside,” Rahman said. “The whole idea is getting children to spend more time outside with nature. It’s good for obesity and mental health. There will be a lot of benefits.”
Under Senate Bill 148, the outdoor education pilot program will last at least three school years, and then state legislators will evaluate its impact.
UNION CITY — FBI agents raided Fulton County’s elections warehouse Wednesday to collect ballots from the 2020 presidential election, an escalation by the Trump administration into unsubstantiated allegations of fraud.
The FBI didn’t release details of its investigation, calling it a “court-authorized law enforcement action.”
A federal search warrant said the FBI is seeking a trove of election records, including all 523,000 ballots cast in Fulton in 2020, absentee ballot envelopes and tabulator tapes.
The seizure of ballots follows years of complaints by Republican President Donald Trump that the 2020 election was stolen after he lost Georgia by fewer than 12,000 ballots to Democrat Joe Biden. Three vote counts showed Biden won Fulton, the heavily Democratic home of Atlanta, with about 73% of the vote.
The FBI executed a search warrant for ballots from the 2020 presidential election at the Fulton County elections warehouse on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026. (Mark Niesse/Capitol Beat)
Fulton’s ballots from the 2020 election have been kept under seal over the last five years despite repeated efforts by Trump’s allies to review them to look for wrongdoing or miscounts. Georgia law prevents ballots from being unsealed without a state judge’s order, but the FBI’s search warrant came from a federal court.
Democrats criticized the raid as federal overreach in an attempt to validate the president’s unproved suspicions, while Republicans praised the FBI for trying to uncover more about the county’s known elections mismanagement.
“I’m not concerned about finding actual evidence because I think it’s very clear that nothing except some poor administration happened,” said State Election Board member Sara Tindall Ghazal, a Democrat, outside the elections warehouse. “What I’m concerned about is the federal government using and abusing its authority.”
State Election Board member Salleigh Grubbs, a Republican who also came to see the search, said she hopes for a thorough investigation.
“It’s been a long time in coming, I think, and getting a lot of the answers that need to be given,” Grubbs said.
Republicans who believe there was wrongdoing have pointed to inaccuracies in Fulton, including state investigations that found over 3,000 double-scanned ballots and early voting documents that lacked required signatures.
While investigations have repeatedly verified sloppiness and disorganization, they’ve never found intentional attempts to alter the vote count.
“This is extremely alarming. I think Fulton County and Georgia in general are tired of being the target of Donald Trump’s narcissism, that’s all this is about,” said state Sen. Josh McLaurin, D-Sandy Springs, a candidate for lieutenant governor. “He is dispatching federal officials at the highest levels of government to try to vindicate his agenda.”
The Department of Justice, which includes the FBI, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“This is another step in the FBI doing the president’s bidding to create a criminal case against Georgia,” said Kristin Nabers, Georgia director of All Voting Is Local, a voting rights group. “By carrying out this farce of an investigation, election deniers are trying to placate his delusions. This is a power grab.”
Three large trucks parked outside the elections warehouse, where agents prepared to load ballots and election documents.
Neither Fulton County’s government nor the secretary of state’s office received advance notice of the raid before agents descended on the elections warehouse.
Mark Davis, a Republican and Georgia elections analyst, said on social media that he talked to the DOJ in September.
“I am over here dancing in my kitchen!” Davis said. “We got our wish, and more. And now we see the fruit of five years of work.”
The State Election Board and the Department of Justice both issued subpoenas last year for 2020 election records, and those subpoenas are still being litigated in court.
Trump pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to reverse the results of the election in early 2021, a demand that resulted in criminal charges against Trump in Fulton. That case was dismissed last year.
Days before the raid, the DOJ sued Georgia to seek access to its voter registration list. Raffensperger has refused to turn over an unredacted voter list, which includes voters’ personal information protected by state law including Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and full birth dates.
ATLANTA — The U.S. Department of Justice has again sued Georgia for the state’s voter list — including voters’ personal information — days after a federal judge dismissed a similar lawsuit filed in the wrong court.
The Trump administration’s demand Tuesday is its latest attempt to force Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to turn over voter registration information as part of a nationwide effort to collect voters’ data.
Raffensperger’s office has said state law requires him to protect voters’ driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers and birth dates — the same information the DOJ wants for an investigation of voter registration accuracy.
“Georgia conducts as much (voter list) maintenance as it is permitted to do under federal law,” according to a court filing by Raffensperger’s office in the case dismissed last week.“… The DOJ is not entitled to confidential information about every Georgia voter.”
Republicans in the Georgia Senate have sided with the DOJ and against Raffensperger, a fellow Republican who is running for governor against Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Attorney General Chris Carr.
The Senate could soon vote on a nonbinding resolution that urges Raffensperger to comply with the DOJ.
Raffensperger’s office provided the DOJ with a public version of Georgia’s voter list that redacted voters’ personal information.
A federal judge dismissed the DOJ’s first lawsuit for Georgia’s voter list last week because it was filed in the incorrect judicial circuit.
The DOJ previously sued in Macon instead of in Atlanta, where the secretary of state’s office is based. The new lawsuit was filed in Atlanta.
ATLANTA — Anger and opposition to the rapid rise of data centers across Georgia has led to a surge of bills that would clamp down on the resource-consuming industry.
Georgia legislators have proposed seven bills regulating data centers by eliminating tax breaks, prohibiting costs from being passed on to residential electricity customers, or temporarily barring their construction entirely.
Data centers — hulking industrial buildings that power artificial intelligence and technology companies — have emerged as one of the hottest topics at the Georgia Capitol this year as they’ve proliferated across the state’s landscape in recent years. There are over 200 data centers in Georgia, according to Baxtel, a data center industry research firm.
DC BLOX Atlanta East Hyperscale Data Center Campus in Conyers, Georgia, on Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. Georgia lawmakers have recently introduced bills to end the tax exemptions on future data centers in response to controversies surrounding power infrastructure and economic impact. (Ashtin Barker/Capitol Beat)
State Sen. Matt Brass, the chairman of the powerful Senate Rules Committee, said residents are worried about the impact of large data centers being built in their communities.
Brass proposed Senate Bill 410, which would end Georgia’s sales tax exemption for new data centers but preserve it for existing facilities. Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed a bill in 2024 that would have eliminated the tax break entirely, citing concerns it would undermine business investment in the state.
“It started with concerns from folks back home. There’s a lot of angst over it,” said Brass, R-Newnan.
Data centers will still invest in Georgia even if they don’t get a tax break, Brass said, citing the state’s energy rates, business climate, weather and property values.
“There’s all these reasons they want to come here, and the tax incentive I don’t believe is one of them,” Brass said.
Georgia taxpayers effectively gave away $474 million to data centers during the fiscal year that ended in July, according to a recent report by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts.
Data centers produced 8,505 construction jobs and 1,641 operations jobs with a combined $1.2 billion added to the state’s economy, according to the department’s summary of the report.
DC BLOX Atlanta East Hyperscale Data Center Campus in Conyers, Georgia, on Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. Georgia lawmakers have recently introduced bills to end the tax exemptions on future data centers in response to controversies surrounding power infrastructure and economic impact. (Ashtin Barker/Capitol Beat)
The Data Center Coalition, a trade association that includes Amazon, Google and Meta, said Georgia has become the fastest-growing data center market in the country.
“Data centers are committed to being responsible neighbors that pay their full cost of service for the energy they use,” said Khara Boender, director of state policy for the Data Center Coalition. “We will continue to work with stakeholders at the state, local and industry level to strike the right balance that maximizes the benefit to Georgia taxpayers, protects against rate increases, and ensures data centers are a net positive for the state.”
Rising energy costs and data centers have become a major campaign issue this year after two Democrats unseated Republican incumbents last fall in elections for the Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities.
State Rep. Ruwa Romman, D-Duluth, proposed a moratorium on new data center construction until March 1, 2027 in House Bill 1012.
“Before we permanently alter the landscape of our state, we have an obligation to properly regulate and assess both the benefits and impacts of these data centers on our communities,” said Romman, a Democratic candidate for governor. “They come to the table with all these promises, and when those promises don’t come true, it’s too late.”
Another bill that would protect residential customers from electricity costs of data centers is already advancing through the legislative process this year. Senate Bill 34, sponsored by Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Hufstetler, R-Rome, was debated last year but is being revived in committee hearings this week.
Other legislation calls for local governments to make public data centers’ water and electricity usage.
Data center bills pending in Georgia
SB 34: Prohibits costs associated with data center fuel generation and transmission from being included in residential electricity rates.
SB 408: Sunsets Georgia’s sales tax break for data centers on Jan. 1, 2027.
SB 410: Eliminates sales tax exemptions for new data centers.
SB 421: Requires local governments to disclose data centers’ water and electricity usage.
HB 528: Requires data centers to report their water consumption, electricity usage and community impacts.
HB 559: Sunsets Georgia’s sales tax break for data centers on Dec. 31, 2026.
HB 1012: Bans new data center construction until March 1, 2027.
A federal appeals court has upheld parts of Georgia’s 2021 voting law that allow state takeovers of county election management and prohibit ballot photography.
The ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals is the latest decision that supports the election law passed in the wake of the 2020 election, when Democrat Joe Biden narrowly defeated Republican Donald Trump in Georgia.
A unanimous three-judge panel found that the plaintiffs, which include election security advocates, lacked standing to sue because they couldn’t show they suffered an injury or that the defendants, including the State Election Board and Gov. Brian Kemp, were responsible for potential harms. The court didn’t rule on the merits of the lawsuit.
“Thanks to the Georgia Election Integrity Act, our state remains the best, most secure state for voting. This ruling is another win in our battle to protect the integrity of our elections,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, one of the defendants. “Rest assured, we will stand firm no matter what group tries to interfere.”
The decision leaves in place the ability for the State Election Board to take over underperforming county election boards. The board declined to take over Fulton County’s election board in 2023, finding it had made significant improvements.
The court also sustained a ban on photographing ballots in polling places while voting was underway.
The law limited drop boxes, required additional forms of ID for absentee voting, prevented mass mailings of absentee ballot application forms and banned handing out food and water to voters waiting in line.
