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The Real Reason Trump Chose Georgia as His First Strike on the 2026 Vote By Shirin Ali
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 ca]mpaign 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.
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 ca]mpaign 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.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/02/trump-georgia-2026-vote-fbi-raid-attack.html
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