The real reason Trump chose Georgia as his first strike on the 2026 vote.
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On Monday, the New York Times reported a bizarre and shocking update to news of an FBI raid last week on a Georgia election office: It turns out that immediately after the federal raid, the FBI officers involved spoke directly with President Donald Trump. To say that this is unusual would be an understatement—it is without precedent. It has long been known that the 2020 election in Georgia is a personal obsession of Trump’s, but the extent to which he is actively, openly, and personally meddling in the state’s elections system is still surprising and new. One big question looming over this entire episode, though, is why—of all the states where Trump falsely claimed there was fraud in 2020—has Georgia become ground zero for the president ahead of the 2026 midterms that election experts feel are potentially threatened by Trump’s latest actions? We think we have a few answers.
Those answers have to do as much with 2026 as they do with 2020. And, perhaps surprisingly, a big motivation for Trump’s assault on Georgia’s election infrastructure now has as much to do with the Republican primaries in the state as with November’s general election. Allow me to explain.
Georgia’s race for governor is considered a toss-up, though Republicans have consistently held the job since 2002. Polling has shown the top Republican contenders are Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. Trump has endorsed Jones, who served as a fake elector in 2020 and was tied up in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ election interference investigation, which charged Trump and several co-conspirators with a criminal conspiracy to steal Georgia’s 2020 election. Jones has focused his campaign on attacking Raffensperger over that election. Raffensperger, as you may recall, has been a longtime personal target of Trump’s after a 2021 phone call with the president in which he was asked to “find” 11,780 votes for Trump in order to flip the state’s 2020 election results.
In order to understand how the race between Rafensperger and Jones relates to the FBI’s raid on Fulton County, it’s necessary to recognize that Georgia’s voting system has been mired in controversy for nearly a decade. Back in 2017, a group of Georgia voters and the Coalition for Good Governance sued the state over its use of Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot-marking devices. These devices are like a tablet and don’t create a paper copy of a voter’s ballot selections; instead they print a paper QR code that can be scanned to see a digital image of a ballot. This, the lawsuit alleged, opens up serious security vulnerabilities that can not only be hacked, but also make it nearly impossible to verify the software accurately recorded a voter’s ballot. When the lawsuit eventually went to trial in 2024, a computer scientist demonstrated live, in court, how he was able to rig Dominion’s voting tablet by rewriting its code and printing out as many ballots as he wanted. In a hypothetical election, the hacking was successful in flipping the outcome of a race.
During that trial, the plaintiffs also pointed to Georgia’s Coffee County data breach that occurred in 2021, where pro-Trump activists physically entered the small, rural county’s election office and copied election system software. A lawyer for the Coalition for Good Governance claimed at the time that the compromised software was not isolated to Coffee County, and that hackers could have access to voting software used in all 159 counties in Georgia. Plus in 2022, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, under the Biden administration, also advised that Dominion’s electronic ballot-casting software presents security vulnerabilities. None of this validated Trump’s phony claims of election fraud in 2020, but it does make the state’s election systems more vulnerable to the sort of episode we witnessed last week.
Ultimately, the Coalition for Good Governance’s 2017 lawsuit failed, with a judge dismissing it just last year, partly because there wasn’t evidence to suggest there had actually been a successful hack of Georgia’s voting software and the state Legislature appeared to have remedied some of the security concerns the lawsuit raised. For instance, the Georgia Legislature approved a bill that would replace its previous QR code system with a readable text to verify a voter’s ballot entry. The new law is supposed to take effect July 1, 2026, though during a series of budget hearings last month, Georgia lawmakers didn’t appropriate any state dollars to implement the change. No budget was allocated to upgrade Georgia’s voting system software either, which would have patched any security holes.
While all of these legal challenges questioned the integrity of Georgia’s voting systems, Raffensperger consistently affirmed his state’s 2020 election results were accurate. His office conducted three separate recounts, including a statewide audit that manually re-tallied every single vote cast, plus another recount requested by the Trump campaign. In the end, Gov. Brian Kemp certified his state’s election results for Biden, though the president has continued to insist he is the rightful winner. As part of this vendetta, Trump even made Kemp and Raffensperger prime targets during the 2022 elections, trying to inspire his MAGA base to vote them both out of office. At the time, he failed miserably.
Now, though, it seems that Trump has found a new way to try to punish Raffensperger. The Trump administration is undoubtedly going to use the baggage surrounding Georgia’s voting system to cast doubt on its 2026 elections and possibly beyond, with the FBI’s recent raid evidence that this is already underway. Georgia provides a three-for-one, from the Trump perspective: He gets to again question the legitimacy of the 2020 election; he gets to again cast blame on Raffensperger, his 2020 antagonist in the state; and he gets to potentially meddle with an election which he desperately wants Raffensperger to lose.
The day after FBI agents raided Fulton County’s election office last week, officials there said federal agents took over 700 boxes of physical voter records, while officials were kept out of the room as it was happening. Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts told reporters he had no clue what the FBI was going to do with all the information it seized. “I don’t know where they are, I don’t know who has them, I don’t know what they’re doing with it,” Pitts said. “I have no clue. I could use my imagination.”
It’s no small stretch of the imagination to foresee Trump’s FBI manipulating Fulton County’s voting records to fit his agenda. “What Trump is trying to do is create a narrative that you can’t trust the voting system in Georgia,” Marilyn Marks, vice president and executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, told Slate. “He’s going to be able to show these ballots that say they were counted wrong and they were cheated, and all of that: ‘You can’t trust Georgia’s voting system, therefore the feds have to come in and help control the voting system.’ ”
Right now Trump is beginning his attack on Georgia’s voting system by inserting federal action, knowing that in a few short months, the state will be holding its gubernatorial primary election on May 19. If Raffensperger secures a win, the White House will be on fertile ground to dispute the results of his election, leveraging information obtained from the FBI’s raid, plus the nearly decade-long legal challenges Georgia’s voting system has faced.
Another added benefit to Trump’s scheme is the threat to the state’s critical U.S. Senate race, where Democrat Jon Ossoff is running for reelection. Ossoff’s narrow win in a 2021 runoff gave Senate Democrats the slimmest majority at the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, while Trump took the brunt of the blame for the GOP defeat at the time. Constantly attacking the integrity of the 2020 election seemed to put voters off.
What ends up shaking out in Georgia remains to be seen, but it’s fair to say that the president is signaling that he is willing to use all the powers of the U.S. government to satisfy his vendetta against those he believes have wronged him. During his speech in Davos, Switzerland, last month, Trump ominously announced that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” while again insisting that the 2020 presidential election he lost was rigged. And just this week, Trump, while speaking on a podcast hosted by former U.S. Deputy Director of the FBI Dan Bongino, openly admitted that he believes Republicans “ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that I won that show I didn’t win. You’re gonna see something in Georgia.”
As someone deeply familiar with the inner workings of Trump’s mind, former special counsel Jack Smith, said during his Congressional testimony last month, Georgia was “ground zero” for the president’s alleged criminal misconduct just five years ago. It could be so again this November.
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