The Justice Department has demanded the identities of every worker who staffed the 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga., according to court records, escalating an ongoing federal investigation of the 2020 vote in Georgia's most populous county that relies on false and debunked claims.
The demand targets employees of Fulton County elections as well as volunteer poll workers, who likely numbered in the thousands during the 2020 election, according to court records.
The demand, which came via a federal grand jury subpoena, appears to be the latest effort by President Trump and his administration to use the investigative power of the federal government to pursue false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. With midterm voting underway in many states, including Georgia, the effort risks further undermining public confidence and sowing chaos among voters.
It is not known what the Justice Department intends to do with the names of election workers. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Robb Pitts, the chairman of the Fulton County commission, issued a statement on Monday calling the subpoena "harassment" and "yet another act of outrageous federal overreach designed to intimidate and to chill participation in elections."
He added: "Let me be crystal clear. Fulton County will not be intimidated."
Earlier this year, agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided an election warehouse in the county, seizing physical ballots from the 2020 election along with other election materials. County officials have since filed a lawsuit to force the Justice Department to return those materials. A ruling from the federal judge overseeing that case could come at any time.
The county received the grand jury subpoena for workers' names on April 20, according to court records. The existence of the subpoena became public on Monday evening when lawyers for Fulton County filed a motion attempting to block it.
"Its purpose is to target, harass, and punish the President's perceived political opponents," the county's motion stated.
The county board argued that the subpoena "cannot yield any evidence that could result in a criminal prosecution" because, among other things, the statutes of limitations have expired "for any purported 2020 election crimes."
The county also asserted that the subpoena requires the disclosure of names, positions, email addresses and personal telephone numbers for ten categories of Fulton County election workers. At a time when "election workers fear for their personal safety," it would apply to volunteers, temporary poll workers and even bus drivers who operated a mobile voting location, the county filing stated.
Lauren Groh-Wargo, who leads Fair Fight Action, a left-leaning voting rights organization, said election workers across the country are facing increased threats and harassment.
"Roughly a third of election officials are threatened on the job, and more than half worry it's making it harder to hire and keep election workers," Ms. Groh-Wargo said in a statement on Monday. "They're trying to break our democracy by attacking the infrastucture, but we are fighting back hard."
Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, is a Democratic stronghold and the most populous county in Georgia. The unproven claim that county election workers somehow helped Democrats steal the 2020 election was a major part of a wide-ranging but ultimately fruitless effort by Mr. Trump and his supporters to reverse Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory in the state.
In December 2020, Trump ally Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was working as Mr. Trump's personal lawyer at the time, went before a Georgia state legislative committee and made a number of false accusations against a pair of poll workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss.
The women had been processing returns on election night. Mr. Giuliani and others wrongly accused the women of pulling thousands of fraudulent ballots from a suitcase in their vote-counting station and illegally feeding them through voting machines.
That episode was featured in a 2023 criminal racketeering indictment against Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani and 17 others filed by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga. The case was dismissed in late 2025 after Ms. Willis was disqualified from handling it.
Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss won a $148 million defamation suit against Mr. Giuliani. The suit was later settled for an unknown sum.
In the current investigation into Fulton County, which began with a court-ordered seizure of election materials from a county warehouse, the F.B.I. so far has not named any election workers, let alone publicly accused any of wrongdoing.
The county noted in its motion that President Trump has for years "obsessively propagated the debunked conspiracy theory that Fulton County 'stole' the 2020 election from him. And he has made it clear that he seeks retribution against those who refuse to indulge his baseless claims."
The motion quoted a 2025 online post in which the president said that Ruby Freeman "should have to pay Rudy back reparations" and called for her and top Georgia officials to be prosecuted for "the political crime of the century."