(Guest Opinion by Al Pearson) Another Paul Revere Moment

On January 28, 2026, the FBI appeared at the Fulton County Georgia election center with a search warrant for the seizure of all records relating to the 2020 general election.  The seizure seems calculated to empower President Trump to do what Vice President Pence would not and constitutionally could not do on January 6, 2021: reverse the outcome of the 2020 election.  It comes at a time when President Trump is pressing for the nationalization of elections with or without congressional approval.  Now, 250 years after Paul Revere’s famous ride, the nation faces another Paul Revere moment.  The mission this time is not to protect the nation against a foreign adversary but to save the nation from its own worst instincts.  In this essay, I examine the origins of the election fraud narrative in Georgia – something the average citizen doesn’t have the time, resources or patience to do and something the mainstream media doesn’t do very well.

The ultimate issue is who can you trust.

Art of the Steal: The Back Story

Donald Trump embraced the election fraud narrative well before he ran for president in 2016 and well before he had any factual basis for bringing it up.  He was nevertheless emphatic about two things: (a) election fraud is rampant and (b) the most cunning practitioners of this dark art – all Democrats – resemble villains out of a James Bond novel.  At the time, Georgia was not on Trump’s radar screen and understandably so.  It had been reliably red since 2005.  The trick for Republicans in statewide races: secure enough popular votes to offset the Democratic vote clustered in urban areas.  The strategy worked well enough for Trump in 2016.   If so, what did he have to worry about in 2020?  More than you might think.

In most discussions about election fraud in Georgia, the persistence of this voting pattern is rarely given its due.  If election fraud exists everywhere all the time as Trump and his supporters claim, why isn’t the supporting evidence readily available?  And why look only in Fulton County?  In the voter verified, paper ballot system used in the 2020 election, you can track the journey of every vote from the state down to the county, precinct, polling place levels and even to the ballot scanner in which the vote was cast.  If something about an election seems amiss, you can isolate, investigate and correct any potential discrepancies.  Undifferentiated suspicions of fraud don’t cut it.  Every discrepancy is not the tip of an election fraud iceberg.

Who Can You Trust?

The 2020 election in Georgia would have been a challenge under normal circumstances.  That election was anything but normal.  At a cost of $110 million dollars, the state introduced what was an entirely new voting system.  The Republican initiative was touted as a major improvement in the reliability of election administration.  In each of Georgia’s 159 counties, a new wave of poll workers had to be recruited and trained.  Much of the organizational work, coordination and training was carried out under State Election Board regulations adopted in February of 2020, little more than a month before the presidential preference primaries were to begin.  A steep learning curve under the pressure of a succession of interrelated deadlines.

Next, factor in the disruptive effects of Covid.  With Republican Governor Brian Kemp at the helm, the state declared a public health state of emergency on March 11, 2020.  Many restrictions followed such as the closure of bars, a ban on gatherings of more than ten people without social distancing and the shutdown of public schools, colleges and universities.  The Democratic presidential preference primary was delayed from March 20 until June 9, 2020.  While these restrictions have been widely disparaged in hindsight, they did not seem so unreasonable at the time.

Meanwhile, election fraud charges loomed ominously over what turned out to be a fiercely contested presidential election.  How did the out-of-power Democrats figure out a way to tamper with that race and only that race under such chaotic circumstances?

It should come as no surprise that the 2020 election with almost 5 million voters would have more glitches than normal.  It likewise should come as no surprise that MAGA election deniers would see such glitches as indicative of something deeper and more nefarious.  What they did not do then and have not done in the intervening six years is explain how an election fraud scheme might have been operationalized in Fulton County on a coordinated, much less, widespread basis.  They haven’t been able to point to a single, verifiable act of election fraud in any of Fulton County’s 381 precincts.

In a sense, the election fraud narrative is like online shopping.  If one scenario doesn’t pan out, you can always conjure up another one.

The upcoming mid-term elections will tell us a lot about the public’s patience with Trump’s obsession over the 2020 election.

After election day in 2020, Trump cried election fraud before it was possible to have any evidence to back it up. He had no way of knowing how it happened, where it happened or who was behind it.  Only election fraud could explain how a politician of his stature could lose to someone like “sleepy” Joe Biden.  If that wasn’t hard enough to swallow, Trump was the first incumbent president to have lost reelection since “light weight” Jimmy Carter and the first Republican to lose a statewide election since 2007.  Not to be overlooked is the fact that Trump took the two incumbent Republican U.S. senators down with him.  As it turns out, the 2016 and 2018 general elections in Georga were actually a harbinger of Trump’s underperformance in 2020.  The 2020 presidential election was not the outlier that Trump and his MAGA continue to claim.

Trump’s last-ditch efforts to reverse the outcome tell us much about his character and his willingness to retain power by any means, fair or foul.

Trump’s Post-Election Campaign

The conventional approach was to go to court.  Trump and his supporters filed numerous lawsuits in Georgia and other battleground states, none successful.  As plaintiffs, they encountered trial tested and knowledgeable defense counsel and came to realize that there are actually judges who would enforce the exacting burden of proof standard applicable to any allegation of fraud.  This meant pleading facts sufficient both to establish standing to sue and a colorable factual basis for judicial intervention.  In Georgia, this burden applies with special force to elections which enjoy a strong presumption of validity.  Otherwise, it might take months to conduct election and then two years or more to find out whether the election passed legal muster.

Around this time, Trump came under the spell of John Eastman, a former constitutional law professor from Chapman University Law School who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.  Eastman had been a long-time fixture in Federalist Society legal circles.  He hatched the theory that Congress could enact legislation permitting a state to replace the slate of electors chosen by popular vote when election fraud was suspected.  This would allow a state legislature to change the election rules in the middle of the game.  A breach of one of the most fundamental tenets of fair play in our society – just ask anyone who has ever played pickup basketball at the local gym.  When Trump tried to sell Governor Kemp and House Speaker David Ralston on the idea, they dismissed it politely (and correctly) as unconstitutional.  Unfazed by this skepticism, Trump’s supporters announced an alternative slate of electors in Georgia just in case.

Meanwhile, Eastman hatched a variant on the alternate electoral slate strategy which had many moving parts and raised the possibility of a political deadlock that would bring the 22^nd amendment into play.  If Trump’s term expired on January 20 without a successor, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could become acting president.  Trump needed someone reliable to be the great vote counter and sooner rather than later.  Who better for that role than Vice President Pence?  After all, under the 12^th amendment, the Vice President presides over the vote count in the Electoral College.  In that capacity, Pence was not a robotic vote counter; he had the discretion to deny recognition to electoral votes from states where election fraud was merely suspected.  Trump could either win the vote outright in the Electoral College or win by a vote of state delegations in the House of Representatives.

The particulars of the Eastman scheme not only lack a textual basis in the constitution; they created a monumental conflict of interest which the average citizen can understand.  One person could manipulate the outcome a presidential election and that person on January 6, 2021 just happened to be an active candidate in the 2020 election along with his boss.  Article II, section 1 of the Constitution actually forecloses that possibility but that seemingly mattered little to Eastman.  It provides that “no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.”  Isn’t the Vice President an Officer of Trust under the United States?  Pence rejected the Eastman scheme triggering an enraged reaction from Trump and his supporters.  Viewed from that perspective, the January 6^th march on the Capitol was less a high-minded rally in support of good government than a raw attempt on Trump’s part to retain power under the flimsiest of pretexts.  As someone supposedly quipped, Trump count votes like he counts stroke in golf.

Trump returned to power in 2024 winning the popular vote nationally and in Georgia.  Once again, he lost in Fulton County as he did in 2016 and 2020. Interestingly, his percentage of the popular vote in Fulton County in 2024 (27.02%) was virtually the same as in 2016 (27.25%) and 2020 (26.16%).  Maybe, Trump’s performance in those elections reflects the simple fact that a large majority of voters Fulton County don’t like Trump and consistently tend to prefer Democratic candidates over Republicans.

So why does Trump continue to obsess over an election whose outcome cannot be changed?  Here Faulkner’s famous dictum about the past never being dead comes to mind.  The ever-feral Trump prizes loyalty, rarely forgets or forgives a slight and never, never admits defeat.

Circling back to the seizure of the Fulton County voting records, what is the Trump endgame?  What we do know is that the search warrant was based mainly, if not entirely, on information generated by long standing MAGA election deniers who omitted important information about the credibility of their witnesses and the reliability of their data.  If the FBI agent or the Magistrate responsible for the issuance of the search warrant had any experience with election administration in Georgia or elsewhere, they surely would have pushed back to distinguish between administrative mistakes and potentially fraudulent ones.  Instead, they handled this matter like your garden variety criminal case.  Why the sudden urgency?  The voting records were securely under Judge McBurney’s control with access subject to his supervision.  Why was it necessary to take them away?  Why was the search warrant affidavit filed under seal with the names of the supporting witnesses redacted?  As a rule, election fraud conspiracists are not shy about making their views known to anybody willing to listen.  We still do not know where the records are stored, who is preparing an inventory of the records, how access to the records will be monitored or who will be authorized to have access.

Eventually, the election fraud narrative will be contested in court and there its proponents will face cross examination by lawyers who know election law and their way around a court room.  The Fulton County motion for return of the voting records appears to be the only vehicle currently available.  Bring your popcorn.

As earlier noted, Trump is angling for nationalization of elections.  How far this can be taken is anybody’s guess.  But the seizure of state voting records could lead to seizure of voting machines and ultimately to the federal takeover of elections.  Trump’s preferred version of the SAVE Act is going to be crucial to this debate.  He is putting on the pressure to dump the filibuster (at least temporarily) and get an up or down vote on the bill.  The common thread to this strategy is the consolidation of power over elections in one person – the president of the United States.  Donald Trump is closer to this objective than he has ever been.

Is he worthy of the public’s trust?

*Al Pearson Background:

• Vanderbilt Law School 1972
• Law Clerk U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals 1972-73
• Faculty Boston College Law School 1973-74
• Supreme Court Fellow – Washington D.C. 1987-88.
• Faculty Georgia Law School 1974-94
• Trial and Appellate Practice 1994-2016
• Areas of specialization: Evidence, Constitutional Law & Civil Rights