A former federal official who tested and certified voting machines used in Fulton County, Georgia for the 2020 presidential election told a court that the federal government misrepresented key facts and omitted exculpatory public evidence while seeking a warrant in last month’s law enforcement raid.

The raid, carried out by the FBI and overseen by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, saw agents seize ballots and other documentation from the Fulton County election offices. A public affidavit cited five core allegations related to the county’s recordkeeping, electronic ballot image storage,  and election night reporting. Authorities allege these issues point to a potential conspiracy to intentionally manipulate the vote count in favor of Democrat Joe Biden.

Fulton County officials sued the federal government in response, arguing that the affidavit used to obtain a warrant for the raid “does not identify facts that establish probable cause that anyone committed a crime.”

Another filing includes sworn testimony from Ryan Macias, an elections expert who tested and certified the county’s voting machines while at the Election Assistance Commission. In his testimony, Macias told the court that the government’s key claims have already been investigated and have been found to be baseless.  

He said the FBI’s “many individual omissions and misstatements” in its affidavit reflect “gross mischaracterizations” of how elections work and directly contradict the conclusions of multiple prior investigations into the Nov. 2020 election in Fulton County.

“Once the statements and omissions in the Affidavit are corrected and based on my experience administering elections, the Affidavit does not have a substantial basis in reality,” Macias stated.

For instance, the FBI’s affidavit cites the absence of scanned images of all 527,925 ballots for the original count and recount. But Macias, who served as an adviser to Fulton County and witnessed pre and post-election operations in 2020, said this was standard practice.  Jurisdictions typically send only the vote count records from their machines on election night, because ballot images and audit logs are much larger files that can slow down the reporting process.

Macias also notes that the FBI affidavit omits that this issue was already investigated by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who found Georgia election workers weren’t required by law to preserve such images until a state law passed in 2021.

An investigator from Raffensperger’s office later told the Board of Elections that “it was “important to note that ballots can be scanned and tabulated without capturing ballot images,” while general counsel Charlene McGowan testified that ballot images play no role in the vote tabulation process and Fulton County’s paper ballots – counted three times – were the “most important” documents to verify the count.

“These explanations about the storing of ballot images have been publicly available for some time,” Macias noted.

Similarly, the FBI cites instances where some Fulton County ballots were scanned multiple times, claiming it shows evidence of “an intentional tabulation of ballots in a false matter” to make the recount and original vote counts match. The bureau also pointed to small, non-determinative differences between the county’s machine recount and totals from a hand-counted risk-limiting audit.

But the federal government again failed to mention in its petition for a warrant that these claims were “exhaustively” investigated by the Secretary of State’s office, which found the errors were benign, the duplicates weren’t counted, and did not impact the final vote count in the state’s count of the 2020 presidential contest.

According to Macias, the government’s affidavit also contains errors about basic facts about Fulton County’s reporting process. This includes misreporting the correct official vote count and the date and time it was transmitted to state officials for tabulation.