Judge orders Fulton County, U.S. government into mediation in fight over seized 2020 election records
A federal judge has ordered Fulton County and the U.S. government to go into mediation over the FBI's seizure of hundreds of boxes of ballots and other records from the county's election hub.
In an order signed on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee said he would like Fulton County and the federal government to mediate the dispute, giving them a deadline of March 4 to agree on a mediator.
"As the parties' most recent filings show, they have had some dialogue regarding a resolution in this matter," Boulee wrote in a footnote. "The filings also demonstrate that those discussions have stalled. In the Court's view, the parties' relative positions point largely to 'an all or nothing approach.'"
If the two parties can't agree on a mediator by the deadline, the court will appoint one. The two sides will then have until March 18 to conduct the mediation and report the results to the court.
Due to Boulee's ruling, an evidentiary hearing scheduled for Friday has been postponed.
Fulton County's legal battle over seized 2020 election records
Boulee's ruling comes a week after Fulton County officials filed an amended motion demanding the FBI return the records, which the county claimed were "improperly seized."
FBI agents arrived at the elections hub in late January with a search warrant seeking documents related to the 2020 election in Fulton County, including: all ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners that tally the votes, electronic ballot images created when the ballots were counted and then recounted, and all voter rolls.
According to the affidavit, the search came as part of an ongoing "FBI criminal investigation into whether any of the improprieties" alleged around the county's handling of the 2020 election "were intentional acts that violated federal criminal laws." The investigation was initiated by a referral from attorney Kurt Olsen, who now serves as President Trump's "director of election security and integrity," overseeing the attempt to investigate Mr. Trump's loss.
The document lists multiple possible "deficiencies or defects" in the Fulton County vote count, including the county's admission that it does not have scanned images of all the ballots counted during the original count or the recount. Fulton County has also confirmed that some ballots were scanned multiple times during the recount, but has argued that it was simply human error and not an attempt to change the election results.
Investigations into complaints about Fulton County's elections by the secretary of state's office, an independent monitor, and a performance review by the state elections board found that the county had "sloppy processes" and disorganization, but no evidence of any fraud or illegal actions that would have affected the election result.
The Associated Press and CBS News contributed to this report.
