The Justice Department is seeking 2020 ballots that were preserved in Atlanta, but federal officials have been more focused on vetting voter rolls for future elections.
President Donald Trump is dialing up pressure on the Justice Department to freshly scrutinize ballots from the 2020 election, raising tensions with administration officials who think their time is better spent examiningvoter lists for future elections.
In recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts, Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted. He recently hiredat the White House a lawyer who worked on contesting the 2020 results. Administrationofficials and allies have asked to inspect votingequipment in Colorado and Missouri. Others are seeking mailballots from Atlanta in 2020, when Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose Georgia since 1992.
Across the administration, though, officials have been more focused on forward-looking steps such as examiningstate voter rolls for people who have moved or aren’t citizens. Some officials are ready to move on from 2020 and want to avoid being called “election deniers,”a term for people who claimed without evidence that Trump beat Biden in the 2020 election.