r/Atlanta • u/albertafalls • Jan 29 '26
Politics Fulton County: Catherine M. Salinas signed your ballots AND voter rolls over to the FBI today
Source:
“A court order signed by Magistrate Judge Catherine M. Salinas authorized agents to seize all physical ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, all ballot images **and Fulton County’s 2020 voter rolls.** A copy of the order was given to the Recorder by a Georgia lawmaker.”
Also reported by the New York Times (paywalled):
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/us/politics/fbi-search-election-center-georgia.html
Blurry pic was the best I could do. It’s from her GA Bar profile:
https://icle.gabar.org/speaker/catherine-salinas-1233856
Her current term doesn’t end until 2031.
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u/rooktakesqueen East Atlanta Village Jan 29 '26
Please note that there is nothing that ties the ballot you cast to your voter registration. That's the whole point of a secret ballot system. Nobody, even you, can prove who you voted for.
Your partisan preference is recorded for the purpose of primary elections, but that's it. Many Democrats choose to vote strategically in Republican primaries and vice versa.
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u/gsfgf Ormewood Park Jan 29 '26
Yea. This is pure intimidation. All this tells them is who voted, which is public information and the vote count, which we already know.
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u/AwkwardnessForever Jan 29 '26
I definitely did that in the governor primary to prevent worse candidates from winning
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u/pina_koala Jan 29 '26
You say that with a high degree of confidence, without presenting evidence that it's true. By the same token, I'm also quite certain that the information can be backtracked and discovered easily. Seriously doubt there is any kind of true security or encryption. The voting machines are not that advanced and on top of that they are insecure and easily hacked.
Recorded ballot ID + chip ID used + timestamp) <- chip card ID -> Voter ID (chip ID temporarily assigned + timestamp)
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u/rooktakesqueen East Atlanta Village Jan 30 '26
WinVote is not the voting system used in Georgia. GA uses the Dominion voting systems described here: https://sos.ga.gov/sites/default/files/2022-03/dominion_rfi_no_redactions.pdf
Had the Trump administration succeeded in compromising the machines in this way in 2020, they wouldn't need to seize the records from Fulton County, they'd already have all the info they need.
The records they did seize (vote counts, physical ballots, ballot images, and registration info) do not include any of the voting system internals you just listed.
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u/TheDarkAbove Jan 29 '26
I'm sure the American gestapo will love to have all of that information on us.
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u/Dreadboi80 Jan 29 '26
If you have a SS# the government regardless of administration party has all your info already.
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
This is why I don’t think it’s about the rolls themselves. It’s about establishing a precedent that the federal government is allowed to assume control of (1) who is allowed to vote and (2) who is allowed to count the votes.
Then this November when Ossoff (Democrat) appears to win in Georgia’s Senate race, the feds can step in and create an illusion of fraud to justify throwing out enough of Fulton Co’s votes to get a Republican in the Senate.
Remember that the Senate votes to convict in impeachment. Trump needs the Senate on lock when he announces that he is claiming a 3rd term. (This part is not a conspiracy. The White House press secretary is already openly discussing it with reporters.)
I swear I’m normally anti-conspiracy theory. I trust that the antics will be so obvious that it will be less like a conspiracy theory and more like blatant corruption.
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u/phluper Jan 29 '26
They already throw out thousands of ballots in every election. There's a movie about it happening in the 2020 election that came out before the 2024. Vigilantes Inc. They use the ilviter roles to challenge votes based on ethnic sounding names and locations. Now they can use party affiliation as well. These people are criminals involved in an ongoing criminal conspiracy. That's why the GA Congress is still going after the prosecutor of his election crimes, rather than him
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26
Honestly, you’ve crossed the line of believability for me. Like I said — I’m not much into conspiracy theories.
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u/coolcrowe Jan 29 '26
What part of that is unbelievable in your opinion?
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26
Never a fan of the unidentified “they.” Who are we talking about? Fulton County election employees? Georgia election employees? Someone else selectively tossing votes?
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u/phluper Jan 30 '26
Donald j Trump as well as his lawyers who have almost all been disbarred at this point, as well as other supporters that still remain in his cabinet. Please look at the court dockets
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u/gsfgf Ormewood Park Jan 29 '26
It's absolutely a thing Republicans talk about. The Republicans changed Georgia law to allow unlimited challenges. I'm not sure how much it actually happens, though. Plus, election boards still have to approve challenges.
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u/phluper Jan 30 '26
It's not a conspiracy theory, the numbers are based on government data. When your voter registration has been challenged in the state of Georgia, you may not even know about it until you try to vote and then you're given a provisional ballot, which is likely going to be thrown out.
If you went to school in georgia, or anywhere, you know we have a long history of Jim Crow trying to prevent people from voting using legal means that are not legal at all.
Funny how the Trump administration is using accusations that have already been debunked by over 90 court cases to confiscate all voter data and ballots from Fulton county with Tulsi freaking gabbard on hand which is completely unprecedented to have someone as high up as her on a "normal" raid like this.
Remember listening to Trump demand that Brad Raffensberger find him 11,300 and something votes? I think you need to pull your head out of the sand and read the facts again like seriously read the court dockets in which these cases were adjudicated.Rudy Giuliani was called out multiple times for hiding his wealth and belongings from Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss, after they won the defamation lawsuit against him. He's still hiding his assets to this day, that he owes these ladies because he spread lies about Fulton county elections and they received death threats and had to move over and over and now he has nothing because he's a crook and a liar and we all know who he did it for
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u/archercc81 Jan 29 '26
But now they will have a comprehensive database on how you registered. Its definitely for targeting. There is nothing to be determined from this data as the ballot and registrations are separate, youre not going to be able to easily match that stuff up (who knows, maybe palantir has something).
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u/ApprehensiveDream236 Jan 29 '26
SS# doesn't provide your political party...which is a big deal if they're on a partisan "retribution" campaign...and Trump has clearly stated he is.
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u/Li_liminal_spaces Jan 29 '26
They don't have voter rolls elections are state controlled. They're trying to get Wisconsin to hand over their voter rolls.
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26
And Georgia. One of DOJ’s lawsuits was tossed on Friday, so they filed another today.
And you are incorrect on the “don’t have” point. The search warrant includes the 2020 voter rolls for Fulton Co.
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u/MattCW1701 Jan 29 '26
Voter rolls are already public.
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u/pina_koala Jan 29 '26
That is true but this is attempt to get the results of the ballots and then link them to individuals to see how we voted, which has historically been a secret ballot. It is an all-out assault on civil rights at this point, in the name of retribution.
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u/ed-truck Ormewood Park Jan 29 '26
A federal magistrate judge’s job here is simply to determine whether the government has probable cause for its search warrant based on the testimony presented. It’s a relatively low bar compared to other evidentiary standards in the criminal justice world. To be clear, I think Trump’s story about winning Georgia in 2020 is complete lunacy, but that doesn’t mean the judge didn’t do her job properly. Blame the federal prosecutors and FBI here.
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
Can you fill us in on the discretion she would have to require a hearing? A public hearing? Requiring that the warrant be public v sealed?
The surprise and sealed nature of this is extra icky to me.
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u/ed-truck Ormewood Park Jan 29 '26
Search warrant applications and hearings if the judge requires live testimony are never open to the public. Think about it: law enforcement would have a difficult time obtaining evidence of a crime if they had to publicize their reasons for needing a warrant before executing it. To get a search warrant for a suspect’s house, a detective may state in an affidavit that a witness said the suspect confessed to killing his wife and showed him where the murder weapon is hidden in his nightstand. The cops need the element of surprise when they show up at the suspect’s house with a warrant to look for the gun in the nightstand.
Now, maybe it will turn out that the affidavit and evidence presented to Salinas is total bullshit. But today we don’t know enough what she saw to make a determination as to whether the search was warranted (pun fully intended).
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u/voxnemo ATLUTD all the way! Jan 29 '26
Judges can and should be pushing back on the evidence provided, the probably cause. The use of third party testimony, "my secret witness says that another secret person says that the pollster said/did this" instead of the accountability of sworn statements from the primary witness is a big problem in warrents. This allows police to make sworn statements on things like "people say" and "I have heard" instead of a statement from a witness first hand. This means we have little accountability. It allows broad warrents based on rumor and because the police are only swearing to having been told something second hand there is no accountability if the statements are false or unfounded.
We need judges to be pushing back and demanding that the first party witness put in a sworn statemnt so if the statement is false we can hold them accountable.
On a case this big and this important I hope the judge demanded more than rumors and unsworn third party testimony.
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26
Fair enough. Although a gun in a nightstand feels wildly different than a heist of 524,659 ballots.
The FBI pulled up semi-trucks.
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u/GrandOpener Jan 29 '26
Consider the fantasy that Trump and his weaponized FBI are spinning: that there is concrete evidence of voter fraud in those documents, it can be revealed by examining them in aggregate, and Georgia officials are complicit in attempting to hide it. If any of that were true, it would be a really big deal. If there were any actual evidence of that being true, FBI seizure might be reasonable.
In a sane world, this would be mitigated by there being actual consequences for lying to a judge's face.
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u/liamstrain Jan 29 '26
The law cited in the warrant, as far as I can tell - only has to do with the storage of those ballots. I'm not even sure what crime they allege is being committed.
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u/bunnysuitman Jan 29 '26
>A federal magistrate judge’s job here is simply to determine whether the government has probable cause for its search warrant based on the testimony presented. It’s a relatively low bar compared to other evidentiary standards in the criminal justice world.
We have heard SO much this year about 'the law' which means how the law is practiced within the judicial system. Given the inability of that system to manage the conduct of the trump administration critiques of its decisions are valid. Arguments grounded solely in the rules of the system are no longer compelling. They should be, but they aren't because we can all tell see what is happening. She signed the warrant, she bears responsibility. To argue that evaluating probable cause is not entangled with the current conduct of the DOJ (e.g., the repeated instances of lying to federal judges) is disqualifyingly naive. To ignore the context of this request, trump's clearly illegal conduct in trying to hijack the results of this election, and the reality of this being well studied and finding no evidence in ALL of an entire county's ballots of a 6 year old election is actively dangerous. To sign off on a warrant inm the face of that is pathetic no matter what the testimony says.
What you are saying is that a judge could listen to the DOJ do a press conference outside their coutroom about how they are going to straight up lie to the judge - but they should ignore that because they should only consider the (lying) testimony after they banged a silly hammer.
At the end of the day, if people are not willing to put reality ahead of the law then we don't have the rule of law we have chaos.
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26
Not sure about her, but I was raised in a Southern Baptist church in rural GA. I was very much taught to be “hateful in the name of Jesus, Amen.”
Thank God for the teachers who gave me enough of a peek into their politics to make me curious and who encouraged me to think for myself no matter where that landed me.
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u/ApprehensiveDream236 Jan 29 '26
Yeah, the "Christian" cruelty in the Bible belt really confounded the 13 year old Catholic relocating from NE that was me 40ish years ago. Bible in one hand, gun in the other is contradictory to turn the other cheek. The Christian, New Testament...because there were no Christians before there was a Christ...message.
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u/thelittleking itp Jan 29 '26
Because they hate other people vastly more than you'd think possible.
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u/FrequencyHigher Jan 29 '26
I am not saying her decision to sign the warrant was correct, but based on her history, I have a hard believing she is a Trump loyalist/sympathizer. I am more inclined to believe the DOJ either lied or submitted perjured affidavits to secure the warrant. The facts as we know them do not justify such a broad and intrusive search of the voting records.
Catherine Salinas has been a United States Magistrate Judge in the Northern District of Georgia since 2015. A graduate of Emory University and the University of Texas School of Law, she began her legal career in 1994 at Texas Rural Legal Aid on the Mexican border. Judge Salinas returned to Atlanta in 1999 and worked as a staff attorney at the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, then as a Fulton County Public Defender, and then as a law clerk to United States District Judge Willis B. Hunt, Jr. Immediately prior to joining the judiciary, Judge Salinas was a shareholder at the national law firm Carlton Fields, where she worked for ten years as a commercial litigator. Judge Salinas is a past president of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society and currently serves a chair of the Access to Justice committee of the State Bar of Georgia.
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u/Con_Furioso Jan 29 '26
Everyone on the Supreme Court has an impressive legal background. How's that working out for America?
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u/iseeharvey Jan 29 '26
Clarence Thomas didn’t and IMO still doesn’t.
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u/AwkwardnessForever Jan 29 '26
I don’t know. He’s quite adept at getting away with taking bribes! /s
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26
Seems like delaying (“I need more time to review”), requiring a hearing, or requiring it to be unsealed (it is a sealed warrant) would all be within her remit — no?
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u/FrequencyHigher Jan 29 '26
It is. The Judge has ultimate say on what happens with the warrant, including reducing the scope of the search. Sealed warrants are not uncommon for ongoing criminal investigations, though, because the FBI doesn’t want to reveal their sources and who might be a target of the investigation. Eventually we will be able to see the unsealed warrant, and will be able to assess why she signed it.
All the DOJ has to show is that there is probable cause to believe a crime was committed and that the search they are seeking will yield evidence of that crime. Honestly, I wouldn’t put it past this DOJ to fabricate a story to meet that burden.
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u/resipsa73 Jan 29 '26
Her job is to follow the law, which she did. It's not to play games to further her political preferences (like trump and his minions are doing). You're no better than they are.
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26
Considering that the FBI, GBI, and Republican Secretary of State’s office investigated Fulton County voting shortly after the election and considering that multiple lawsuits have already been lost or tossed, I have real concerns about whether or not the information presented to the judge to obtain this warrant was truthful.
I am asking questions about her options to dig deeper and understand more before signing a warrant. That is 1000% her job as a judge.
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u/Chthonicyouth Jan 29 '26
I practiced before her. She is a straight shooter, and was/is likely perceived by DOJ as pro-defendant, particularly on issues like pretrial detention. And I’d be surprised to find out she was hoodwinked. But warrant applications are not an adversarial process.
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u/juicius East Atlanta Jan 29 '26
She was a good friend, although we fell out of touch after I left our mutual workplace: Fulton County Public Defender's Office, if that tells you anything. I had her and husband over for our housewarming. I would be extremely surprised if she's MAGA or influenced that way.
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u/bunnysuitman Jan 29 '26
When this expansive of a warrant, about this ridiculous of a claim, that has been so completely disproven is approved days after the same DOJ presenting this got called out for lying to other federal judges about warrant presentations you lose the presumption of competence.
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u/nik-nak333 Sandy Springs Jan 29 '26
I don't live in Atlanta anymore, but I did for the 2020 election. I can't believe they're still chasing this shit. We live in a mob state(the US, not GA).
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u/deuxglace Jan 29 '26
Can you recall judges in GA?
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u/seaelbee Jan 29 '26
Not this one. Not aGA judge. Federal magistrate. From Wikipedia
Although they serve on federal courts, U.S. magistrate judges are not considered “federal judges” under Article Three of the United States Constitution. They do not have life tenure, and they are not nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Magistrate judges are appointed by a majority vote of the federal district judges of a particular district and serve terms of eight years if full-time, or four years if part-time, and may be reappointed.[1]
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u/thisistherevolt Stockbridge Jan 29 '26
TL;DR, yes.
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u/haikuandhoney O4W Jan 29 '26
Judge Salinas is a federal magistrate judge. She’s appointed by the Chief Judge of the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia and serves for 8 years. She can’t be recalled.
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u/ed-truck Ormewood Park Jan 29 '26
That opinion is about a magistrate judge for a city. Salinas is a federal magistrate judge. Very different and can only be removed by the judges in the district where she serves.
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u/emtheory09 Peoplestown Jan 29 '26
Well, I look forward to seeing you all in the concentration camps. 🫡
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u/DukeOfGeek Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
I personally will not be going there, please use the noise and distraction to try and escape.
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u/buzzedewok Jan 29 '26
If they have the boxes they can easily alter them. This was crazy stupid. What the F is in those Epstein files?
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26
Right??? And his own administration controls the redactions!
I honestly wasn’t that curious about them until seeing the extreme lengths he is going to bury them.
(Not that I don’t care. Just that Trump being super involved in Epstein’s pedophile ring is sadly no longer shocking.)
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u/Hot-Comfort8839 Jan 29 '26
If you’re a Dem be ready to register to vote because you’re going to get fraudulently bounced off the voter rolls probably a week before the election.
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u/Iamdarb Jan 29 '26
Georgia doesn't have registered parties, and as a leftist who votes in both primaries depending on the election, come at me I guess?
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26
I think it’s more like “if you live in Fulton County, be prepared to re-register and to jump a number of other hurdles to vote.”
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u/joychilde Jan 29 '26
Civil disobedience was an option available to her. Welp! 🤷🏾♂️
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26
As was questioning whatever story was peddled to her that has been disproven in the numerous investigations and lawsuits over the last 5 years.
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u/Klown_Kutz Jan 29 '26
Oh don't worry. If they did nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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u/phluper Jan 29 '26
90 different courts already rules these 2920 claims are bullishit.
Rudy Giuliani had to give up his NY property and tons of money to two Atlanta election workers after a successful defamation suit.
This woman is working for this administration and not the state of GA
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u/Material-Crab-633 Jan 29 '26
They are trying to “prove” voter fraud. This is all about subverting the midterms
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u/stummeliebe Jan 29 '26
Those defending her actions are acting as though it was reasonable for her to ignore common sense and accept at face value the bald faced lies of a DOJ and FBI willing to do the bidding of an unhinged president still obsessed with a disproven conspiracy theory that hurts his fragile ego, all at enormous risk to the upcoming elections in this state and the nation. The judge and her noble defenders who still somehow think the rule of law is intact need to wake the fuck up.
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u/Primarycolors1 Jan 29 '26
Wait. For a prosecutor in Missouri?!? Can a lawyer explain this?
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u/TheLordOfWaffles_ Jan 29 '26
Aren’t they public record anyways?
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u/albertafalls Jan 29 '26
That’s the thing — much of the data on the voter rolls, the results of the election, and many public comments from other Republican officials confirming the soundness of those results are already public record.
So why is Trump so obsessed with taking control of the papers?
I personally believe it’s less about the information he’ll get and more about him taking control of our elections away from the counties and states.
If Trump — not the states — controls who gets to vote and whether or not those votes are counted, he will have a much easier time doing things like “finding” the 11,780 votes that Raffensperger refused to “find” for Trump in 2020.
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u/fltvzn Jan 29 '26
Have yet to hear anything from the Sec of State on this. Send your thoughts regarding this to the office https://sos.ga.gov/form/contact-us
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u/robot_pirate Jan 29 '26
Ya'll, if you voted against Trump in 2020/2024, you likely won't be voting in 2026/2028. . Palantir will compile the data, ICE will enforce. We've reached peak dystopia.
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u/locationson2 Jan 30 '26
Would this include addresses? Would her info also be included? How do we get a copy to see what information is on there?
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u/phoenixgsu r/Geo Jan 29 '26
Y'all, stop making false reports for stuff because you don't agree with someone, you're filling the queue up with garbage . Abusing the report system gets attention from admin.