ATLANTA — The battle over voter confidence in Georgia’s election machines flared up after the Legislature decided last month to keep them until 2028.
Weeks after lawmakers voted to postpone their prior ban on the machines’ use of QR codes to tally results, the U.S. Department of Justice planned to surge into Atlanta with 260 FBI analysts. They were coming to help investigate the 2020 election, after the agency’s January raid of the Fulton County election warehouse to seize more than half a million ballots.
And the Federal Emergency Management Agency threatened to withhold anti-terrorism funds from states that do not start moving toward hand-marked paper ballots.
But the Trump administration also suffered a serious setback in its efforts to expand the 2020 election probe of Fulton, the most populous county in Georgia and a Democratic bastion.
A federal judge in Atlanta denied the administration’s demand for the personal information of thousands of Fulton election workers and volunteers.
The statute of limitations on any crimes in 2020 had long since expired, U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II ruled on July 7, denying the Justice Department’s grand jury subpoena.
Disclosing addresses, phone numbers and other sensitive information “threatens to chill participation in future elections, which will surely impact Fulton County,” the judge’s order said.
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)
Ray decided the administration’s subpoena was unreasonable, calling it an “arbitrary fishing expedition.”
Fulton Commissioner Dana Barrett said the ruling by a judge who was appointed by President Donald Trump should put the 2020 election to rest.
“The conspiracy theory that the election was stolen and there was wrongdoing, that needs to now recede to the corners of the internet where conspiracy theories live,” Barrett said. “Go into the corner where the Jewish space lasers are and Area 51 and the JFK assassination.”
Barrett, who ran unsuccessfully in the recent Democratic runoff for secretary of state, said the Justice Department, the State Election Board and the “election deniers of the world” were using fictions about 2020 to sow doubts about Fulton and its ability to run clean elections.
She said it was a pretext for intervention in the county elections operations in 2026 and 2028: “It’s about trying to continue the narrative that Fulton County doesn’t know how to run elections and therefore either take that ability completely away from the county and put it in the hands of the MAGA-controlled state election board or put monitors in.”
The election board establishes the rules by which elections operate. Four of its five members are Republicans, and several are critical of Georgia’s electronic voting machines and of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who selected the system.
This week, the board adopted two rules, one banning the use of optical character recognition to tally votes even though the state’s election machines do not use that technology. The other rule would require that Raffensperger allow board members into his election center when county-level vote counts are aggregated on election night.
That rule passed even though Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr told the board it lacked legal authority to implement it, since Raffensperger was elected by voters.
The board also initiated a public comment process on a rule that would disqualify the current voting machines over privacy issues.
Salleigh Grubbs, the author, cited several concerns, including the “huge” displays on the machines.
Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat, called it a ruse to force election officials to use the paper ballots they keep for power outages and other emergencies.
Board Chairman John Fervier, a Republican, expressed a similar suspicion.
“This isn’t just about ballot secrecy,” said Fervier, who was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp. “It’s all part of a larger agenda to get to hand-marked paper ballots.”
Fervier said that if the current machines were disqualified over secrecy concerns, it would cause “massive” problems for election officials, who are already busy recruiting and training poll workers on the current system. Local election leaders have repeatedly said they lack the time to switch systems before the general elections in November.
The measure passed, setting it on course for adoption.
Democrats have been dubious about the ongoing assault on Georgia’s voting machines.
Two years ago, Republican lawmakers pushed through a ban on the use of QR codes to tally votes, which would have made Georgia’s current system illegal effective July 1.
But they failed to approve and pay for an alternative system, so Kemp called them back to the Capitol last month to address the looming deadline.
They postponed the ban until 2028.
Just before the special session, Democratic lawmakers from across the South gathered in Atlanta to strategize ahead of the special session. With them was Rep. Carolyn Hugley, D-Columbus, the minority leader of the state House.
“The QR code is a manufactured issue to begin with because a certain person could not accept the fact that he did not win Georgia,” Hugley said at that event, referring to Trump.
Raffensperger has consistently pushed back against his GOP critics, asserting that his machines are all but flawless.
This week, his office announced the results of a review of all 91 contests in last month’s runoffs. The audit of all 1,111,856 ballot images found 23 discrepancies with hand-marked ballots and none with the digital voting machines.
“We run elections with nearly perfect accuracy, and we will never stop reminding the public their machines are accurate, their counts are accurate, and that elections in Georgia are accurate,” Raffensperger said in a statement.
His office calculated that the hand-marked error rate would create about 3,500 discrepancies in a presidential election year with 5 million ballots cast.
The state Republican Party and many GOP lawmakers, dismiss such audits as window dressing, saying flaws in the system make errors difficult or impossible to detect.
The national fight over elections has taken a toll on voter confidence.
A PBS News/NPR/Marist poll in March found that two-thirds of Americans are confident in fair and accurate elections, down from 76% in late 2024.
Georgia GOP voters had a different take.
A survey in late April of likely Republican primary voters by the firm Cygnal had more than 78% expressing confidence that their votes would be counted fairly in 2026, with 28% “very” confident and more than 50% “somewhat” confident.
The poll was commissioned by the bipartisan Democracy Defense Project, which is trying to counter “false narratives about ‘stolen elections'” that it blames on a “proliferation of politicians” who are trying to bolster their own campaigns.
The project’s Georgia board members include former Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. On the Republican side are former U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss and former U.S. Rep. Drew Ferguson.
Ferguson and Franklin appeared at the DeKalb County elections center during the runoff last month to push back against doubters.
They pointed to record turnout in recent years.
“What we have found is 80% of voters on a bipartisan level feel very strongly that the elections are being run fairly and safely here in the state of Georgia,” Ferguson said.
But the Democracy Defense Project’s own polling indicates lingering suspicion.
That April survey by Cygnal found that nearly 76% of likely GOP primary voters approved of the FBI raid on the Fulton elections warehouse, more than 61% strongly approving.
ATLANTA — Georgia tax revenues fell in June, driven by a gas tax suspension and helped along by increased income tax refunds.
Net tax revenues for the month fell 6.8% compared with June 2025, according to the Georgia Department of Revenue.
The bulk of it was driven by a nearly $197 million decline in motor fuel excise tax collections, which Gov. Brian Kemp’s office attributed to his executive order extending the suspension of that tax from May 20 through June 3.
The General Assembly had previously suspended it starting March 20, as the war in Iran drove up prices at the pump.
As the expiration date approached ahead of Memorial Day, Kemp called a state of emergency to extend it. He then called lawmakers back to the Capitol for a special session, in part to retroactively approve his decision.
Last month, the state revenue department reported that motor fuel tax collections for May fell nearly $200 million compared with May 2025.
Even without the fuel tax suspension, state revenues lagged in June. Net tax revenues fell just over $215 million from June 2025. Excluding motor fuel tax changes, net tax revenues were down 0.6% for the month.
Another big driver was an increase in individual income tax refunds, up nearly $67 million, or about 71%. That contributed to a nearly $100 million decline in individual income tax collections compared to June last year.
Most eligible taxpayers also benefited from House Bill 1000 this year, which passed the General Assembly unanimously, with an estimated price tag of nearly $1.2 billion. Taxpayers who filed timely state returns for 2024 and 2025 were set to receive one-time rebates of $250 for individuals, $375 for heads of household and $500 for married couples filing jointly.
ATLANTA — Georgia’s election board adopted two rules Wednesday aimed at bolstering confidence in the state’s election system.
One of the rules will have no immediate impact since it bans a method of counting votes that will not be used anytime soon. The other could land the State Election Board in court after Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr warned that it was a constitutional overreach.
A third measure that would have banned the use of digital barcodes when tabulating votes failed over concerns that it conflicted with the will of the General Assembly. Lawmakers two years ago adopted a ban on QR codes that was to take effect at the start of this month. But they delayed implementation until 2028 during their recent special session.
Their new law also established a study committee that must recommend a replacement voting system based on hand-marked paper ballots.
The rules adopted by the election board are supported by people who lack confidence in Georgia’s current digital system. Voters tap their selections on a digital screen, and the system then prints out their choices on a sheet of paper that they deliver to a scanner that records the ballot.
The sheet of paper bears the names of their chosen candidates, along with a QR code with data that is supposed to match those selections. The scanners tabulate votes based on the QR code data, leaving skeptics to question whether the printed text and the QR code match.
Had lawmakers not delayed the QR code ban, the Georgia secretary of state’s office was prepared to use optical character recognition technology, or OCR, to tally votes, using the QR codes only as a check.
The first rule to pass the election board Wednesday would prohibit that. The new rule, adopted 3-1, would require that tabulation occur directly from a paper ballot and not an electronic copy.
Critics have pointed out that OCR technology uses digital images of ballots.
“The point is that the vote is contained on the paper ballot, not a copy of the vote,” said board member Salleigh Grubbs, who proposed the rule.
The next rule to pass would require that all vote tabulations and consolidations occur in public.
Results are tabulated at the precinct level. State law mandates election observers be allowed to monitor the process.
The secretary of state’s office receives those numbers and aggregates them into totals for each race.
Grubbs and other critics of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have complained that he has refused to allow most election board members access to his “bunker” on election nights, calling it a violation of the law.
So the second rule would pry open Raffensperger’s doors.
Grubbs was appointed by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Republican.
Sara Tindall Ghazal, the only Democratic appointee on the board, objected, saying she supported more transparency but that the board lacked authority to give instructions to Raffensperger, who was elected by voters.
Board Chairman John Fervier, appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, pointed to a May 12 letter from Carr that said the election board lacked authority under state law to adopt this rule. He voted with Ghazal against it, saying it could trigger a lawsuit.
It still passed 3-2.
Grubbs lost support from another Republican on another vote.
Janelle King, an appointee of the Republican-controlled state House, said Grubbs’ proposed rule banning the use of barcodes conflicted with the new law delaying the QR code ban.
The proposal to initiate rule-making failed 2-3, as Fervier and King sided with Ghazal against adoption. That left Grubbs with just one ally in new Republican Party appointee Carolyn Roddy, who had supported her other measures.
Grubbs said the rule was needed to give voters confidence that the names printed on their ballots controlled the tabulation results, since voters cannot read the QR codes printed on their ballots.
Fervier said he trusted that the text matched the data in the QR code on his ballots.
“I don’t have the level of skepticism of some others on that,” he said.
The board also voted to begin a public comment process on a rule aimed at enhancing voter privacy. Ballot secrecy is a legal requirement, Grubbs said, but she said the “huge” displays on the current voting machines are subject to prying eyes.
ATLANTA — A 1980s law originally aimed mainly at organized crime can be used in domestic disputes, the Georgia Supreme Court clarified in a ruling involving a legal clash between former spouses.
The decision last week reversed the state Court of Appeals, which had ruled that the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, did not apply to domestic disputes.
Legal experts were not surprised by the high court’s decision but said it preserves a powerful legal tool that could lead to more respect for civil proceedings, since the racketeering law enhances the consequences for playing fast and loose with facts and rules.
“So many of the predicate crimes to satisfy the RICO statute routinely occur in what the Court of Appeals is calling ‘garden variety domestic cases’,” said Tanya Washington, a Georgia State University law professor. “Forgery and fraudulent communications and engaging with other people for them to testify a certain way. All of those sorts of things happen in family law cases.”
If a party is found to have violated some of the 43 categories of offenses listed under the racketeering law, it can lead to severe financial penalties, she said, or even a criminal investigation: “It makes it easier for a prosecutor to pick up the RICO claim and follow the breadcrumbs.”
The unanimous Supreme Court opinion issued June 30 nullified an appellate decision that said it would be “absurd” and “in defiance of common sense and sound reasoning” to apply the RICO Act “to any garden-variety domestic dispute.”
The appeals court had affirmed a decision in a Paulding County Superior Court lawsuit brought by Jennifer Warner against her ex-husband, Jeffrey Espitia, and his fiancée, Krystal Kriewaldt.
Warner invoked the RICO Act after the Cobb County Superior Court ruled against Espitia in a prior lawsuit. He had sued to recover child support from her that he claimed was in arrears.
Their two children lived with him, and he asserted that she had failed to make her monthly $550 payments.
But he admitted in court that he had presented incorrect information and was uncertain about the arrears, saying it was an inadvertent error. He said he had trusted Kriewaldt’s calculations.
The Cobb court determined Espitia’s claims were “substantially frivolous, substantially groundless, and substantially vexatious,” finding that he had gone to court to harass and intimidate his ex-wife.
Armed with that decision, Warner sued in Paulding, invoking the RICO Act.
The Paulding court ruled against her, so she appealed. The appeals court also decided against her, ruling that her underlying claims against her ex-husband were not a matter for the court to consider because the RICO Act did not apply. The appeals court described her lawsuit as “yet another volley in the parties’ long-running domestic dispute,” adding that nothing in the RICO Act suggests it “may be warped so far beyond its original purpose of combating organized crime to apply to a festering domestic feud.”
Warner then appealed to the state Supreme Court, which criticized the appeals court’s opinion on RICO’s applicability, saying the opinion lacked “any meaningful analysis” of Georgia’s racketeering law. The high court ordered the appeals court to consider Warner’s underlying claim that her ex-husband and his fiancée had conspired to file false documents about her child support payments.
Lawmakers clearly intended RICO to target more than organized crime when they updated the law in 1997 to thwart “the increasing sophistication of various criminal elements,” the Supreme Court opinion said.
The opinion also criticized the appellate court for misusing what’s known as the “absurdity” doctrine, a legal analysis that courts can use when the text of a law produces more than one plausible interpretation. If one outcome produces absurd results and another does not, a court should generally side with the latter interpretation, the Supreme Court opinion noted.
But in this case, the opinion said, there was only one plausible interpretation of the text of the law, which prohibits “any person” from conspiring to violate RICO’s provisions.
John Floyd, a former prosecutor and RICO expert who now uses the law mostly in corporate lawsuits for the Atlanta law firm Bondurant Mixson & Elmore, said the Supreme Court needed to send a message to lower courts that the racketeering law applies broadly. Otherwise, he said, the appeals court ruling might have precluded RICO claims in civil cases, including in serious domestic disputes involving threats of murder, kidnapping or other violence.
Floyd helped prosecute Atlanta Public Schools educators for cheating on test scores and then helped Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis with her election conspiracy case against President Donald Trump and his associates.
RICO cases are difficult to bring, but the law provides a powerful legal tool against conspirators in criminal and civil cases, he said.
Civil RICO judgments can result in treble damages, attorney fees and injunctions.
Although the financial stakes in this particular domestic dispute might have been modest, Floyd said, “a bad decision in a case like that still cascades down through everything, whether the next case is a $100 case or a $100 million case.”
ATLANTA — A real estate company that gave homeowners money in exchange for a pledge to use its services when they sold their homes decades later has been ordered to pay $1 million to hundreds of Georgians.
MV Realty also was barred from doing business in Georgia, state Attorney General Chris Carr announced Monday.
The Florida-based real estate brokerage enrolled more than 3,300 Georgians, nearly a third of them 60 and older, in a Homeowner Benefit Agreement.
Marketed as a free cash program, participants were given small sums if they agreed to use MV Realty’s services. Carr’s office said in a statement that the homeowners did not realize they were entering a 40-year agreement that would cost them at least 3% of their home value if they sold without using MV Realty as their agent. The charge also applied to property transfers and foreclosures.
“MV Realty took advantage of Georgia homeowners who were already struggling — scamming them out of their equity and putting their life savings at risk,” Carr said in the statement, calling the company’s actions “unconscionable.”
More than 400 Georgians paid MV Realty’s early termination fee, a fee that Carr said was unlawful.
Carr’s office obtained a court order prohibiting MV Realty from doing business in Georgia and requiring the company to pay $1 million in restitution for homeowners.
The company also was ordered to terminate all Memorandums of Homeowner Benefit Agreement in Georgia, which acted like a “cloud” or a lien on property records, interfering with sales, refinancings and reverse mortgages.
The judgment stems from a 2024 lawsuit by Carr’s office.
Affected homeowners will receive restitution through Carr’s office. Anyone entitled to relief who has not received money can contact Carr’s Consumer Protection Division online at consumer.ga.gov or by calling 404-651-8600.
