A federal judge has quashed the Justice Department’s election worker subpoena targeting Fulton County, Georgia, ruling that the government’s demand for the personal details of thousands of 2020 election staff was legally unjustified and procedurally unreasonable. The decision, handed down on Tuesday, delivers a setback to the Trump administration’s ongoing scrutiny of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election count.
U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II, sitting in the Northern District of Georgia, issued a 28-page order rejecting the subpoena under Rule 17(c)(2) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which requires courts to assess whether a grand jury subpoena is ‘unreasonable or oppressive,’ weighing investigatory need against the burden of compliance, according to JURIST. Judge Ray was appointed to that court by President Trump in 2018, per CNBC.
Scope of the Election Worker Subpoena
The subpoena, which the Justice Department served in April, went considerably beyond a simple list of names. It sought the home addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers of county employees and volunteer poll workers who participated in election-day activities, vote-counting, and any subsequent audit or recount, according to Democracy Docket. The court described the breadth of information requested as ‘staggering,’ noting that Fulton County, Georgia’s most populous, was being asked to expose personal identifying information for what would amount to thousands of individuals.
Fulton County filed its motion to quash on 4 May 2026, under Case No. 1:26-mi-99999-UNA in the Northern District of Georgia, characterising the North Carolina-issued grand jury subpoena as an ‘unprecedented’ effort to ‘target and harass the President’s perceived political enemies,’ per the motion document hosted by Georgia Recorder.
Statute of Limitations Proves Fatal to DOJ’s Case
The central legal obstacle for the government was the expiration of the statute of limitations on any alleged offences arising from the 2020 election. Judge Ray wrote that ‘an investigation of alleged criminal conduct of anyone that may have led to the certification of the 2020 Election in Georgia would not be a legitimate use of the Grand Jury and its subpoena power, in that no valid indictment could issue from said Grand Jury due to the expiration of the applicable statutes of limitations.’
The DOJ sought to revive its position by arguing that any subsequent criminal acts, or acts in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy, would restart the limitations period, and that the possibility of criminal obstruction created a timely offence. The court rejected that reasoning, finding that Supreme Court precedent foreclosed the argument, as Fulton County had contended at the hearing.
The government also pointed to a related proceeding in which FBI agents executed a search warrant in January 2026, seizing several hundred boxes of ballots, ballot images, tabulators, and voter rolls from the county’s storage facility, as documented by the Brennan Center for Justice. In that matter, a different judge declined to immediately return the materials after a witness told an FBI Special Agent that some ballot images may have been modified as recently as 11 January 2024. Judge Ray dismissed the relevance: ‘it is not clear how poll workers from November 2020 would have anything to do with alleged alterations in January 2024.’
Applying the Rule 17(c)(2) balancing test, the court found the government’s need for the information ‘questionable, at best,’ concluding that even if the records led investigators to individuals who doubted the fairness of the 2020 result, those records ‘would not lead to information that could be used to charge anyone with anything, at least not any viable charge.’ The subpoena, the order states, ‘is unreasonable and must be quashed.’
The order also addressed President Trump directly, observing that ‘it has long been the view of the current President of the United States, both before and after he was elected in the 2024 General Election, that he was denied re-election to a second consecutive term in 2020 due to election fraud,’ before questioning whether the subpoena represented a legitimate law enforcement exercise.
In a footnote, Judge Ray observed that 2026 is itself an election year and that Fulton County will require many workers and volunteers to run the General Election in November, warning that releasing workers’ personal data ‘threatens to chill participation in future elections,’ per MS NOW.
A DOJ spokesperson said the department ‘is considering all options to challenge’ the ruling, characterising it as ‘at odds with numerous holdings of the Supreme Court,’ according to Politico. Whether the government pursues an appeal to the Eleventh Circuit will determine whether the election worker subpoena issue returns before a higher court before November’s ballot.
