Unwarranted

This Week in Democracy

• States United released a new report rebutting allegations made by the Election Oversight Group (EOG) that irregularities occurred during the 2020 presidential election in Fulton County, Georgia. The claims in the EOG’s report were also used as the basis for the FBI’s raid of a Georgia elections office in January.

  Our report, authored by legal and election administration experts, evaluates the highly unusual claims about the 2020 election with scrutiny, skepticism, and election expertise. The authors find that the EOG’s report is fundamentally flawed in multiple ways: It ignores basic safeguards in the election process, cherry-picks information, and omits any information about the numerous investigations already conducted into the election.

  “The investigation into Fulton County isn’t happening in a vacuum,” States United’s Dax Goldstein said. “It’s part of a broader pattern of the Trump administration pressuring states and undermining trust in our elections—and it’s all driven by conspiracies and lies. This report demonstrates that the claims driving that pressure are deeply flawed and unsupported. The facts are clear: the 2020 election in Fulton County was free, fair, and secure.”

  ➡️ READ: Our full report

• A new States United survey shows that Americans are strongly opposed to federal interference in this year’s midterm elections, similar results as those from an August 2025 survey. The survey released this week also finds that just shy of half of all Americans are concerned that President Trump might use the military to seize ballots and voting machines—something he said he “should have” done in 2020.

  ➡️ READ: The full survey

• The Society for the Rule of Law, represented by States United, filed a brief in the Justice Department’s appeal of a ruling that disqualified John Sarcone III from serving as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York. A judge disqualified Sarcone in January, finding that he was unlawfully appointed.

  The U.S. Constitution and federal law define the steps the White House must take to appoint federal prosecutors. That process gives some authority to Congress and judges to check the executive branch’s power. But the Trump administration violated that process when appointing Sarcone, the brief argues.

  The Trump administration’s actions “threaten the legitimacy of prosecutions, the credibility of U.S. Attorney’s offices, and the fair and impartial administration of justice,” the group writes.

  ➡️ MORE: About our brief

  States United and the Society for the Rule of Law Institute also wrote to Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, urging him to withdraw a policy proposal that would undercut state bar associations’ ability to conduct ethics investigations into Justice Department attorneys. The policy would violate federal law and “further erode public trust in the Department of Justice and respect for the rule of law,” the letter reads.

• A federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin that sought to force him to turn over private information about his state’s voters. The department has sued 29 other states and Washington, D.C., for similar information; Judges have dismissed the cases against California, Michigan, and Oregon.

  ➡️ READ: Sharing the Facts About Federal Efforts to Compile State Voter Data

State of the States

In Arizona, state Sen. Warren Petersen asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Attorney General Kris Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, accusing them of interfering with a federal investigation.

Petersen announced in March that he had received a subpoena from the FBI for records related to a so-called “audit” of the state’s 2020 election results. Mayes and Fontes wrote to him shortly after, asking if he provided any information to the FBI that is “not generally available for public inspection.”

“My main concern for ensuring privacy of personal information in voter registration data, as required by law, remains,” Fontes said in a statement. “[T]he state Senate and the federal government continue to sidestep direct questions regarding which voter information may have been made available illegally. Political threats are not going to deter me from working to protect Arizona’s voters,” he added.

“[M]ake no mistake—this is not about 2020. This is about laying the groundwork to deny the results of the 2026 election if they don’t go their way,” Mayes said in a statement. “No matter what Warren Petersen or the Trump administration have to say, I took an oath to uphold our Constitution and defend our elections and I will not be deterred from doing so.”

In California, the state Supreme Court ordered a county sheriff to pause his investigation into more than half a million ballots cast in 2025. The sheriff seized the ballots last month after a group of citizens claimed it had conducted an “audit” and found discrepancies.

Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the sheriff in response, alleging that he failed to meet basic legal standards when obtaining warrants to seize the ballots. Bonta asked the court to order the sheriff to halt his investigation and preserve records related to it.

“The Riverside County Sheriff willfully defied my direct orders, seized 650,000 ballots, misused criminal investigatory tools, and created a constitutional emergency in the process,” Bonta said in a statement. “Today’s decision by the California Supreme Court reins in the destabilizing actions of a rogue Sheriff, prohibiting him from continuing this investigation while our litigation continues.”

The warrants were later made public and election experts noted how weakly they were supported. “This is much like the search warrant that was issued in relation to the seizure of ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, which was also based on discredited claims from election conspiracy theorists,” wrote Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law and the director of its Safeguarding Democracy Project.