UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project put out a guide on Wednesday telling judges how to handle requests to seize ballots during an election. NPR saw it first. The project’s director, Rick Hasen, who led the writing, put the reason bluntly: “Lots of things that were off the table are now on the table.”
Two search warrants this year, one in Fulton County, Georgia, and one in Riverside County, California, involved the seizure of ballots. Trump has said he regrets not pushing harder to have the federal government take election equipment after the 2020 election.
Hasen said the Fulton County warrant alarmed the legal community as much for how it was approved as for the raid itself. “Eventually we got to see the search warrant and it confirmed some of our worst fears,” he said. By his account, it leaned on information about possible fraud in Georgia that came from discredited conspiracy theories.
The people who sign such warrants are usually magistrate judges, and Hasen noted they are not election experts. This fall they could face shaky claims in the middle of a flood of misinformation. So the guide’s first piece of advice is not to decide alone. “One of our key recommendations is to bring election administrators into the conversation,” Hasen said.
Why the chain of custody matters
One state election official told NPR, without permission to speak publicly, that the office has held three statewide trainings this year on what to do if law enforcement tries to take ballots or election materials while voting is still going on. The official described the worry in an earlier interview: close races, then the DOJ or FBI arriving at a county office to say they suspect trouble and mean to confiscate every ballot to count them.
If that happened before certification, officials might not know how many ballots had come back or whether the seized ones had been tampered with. Election workers call this breaking the chain of custody. “They could do so much damage if they did that,” the official said.
Hasen pointed to Michigan, where the chain of custody broke for a few dozen ballots in 2025. That mayoral race was decided by 11 votes, and the result is still disputed. Officials fear a fight like that in a House or Senate contest that decides control of Congress. “We want judges to understand you can’t unscramble the egg,” Hasen said. Once ballots leave the hands of election officials, he said, there will at least be conspiracy theories that they were altered, added to or removed.
What judges are told to consider
The guide lists alternatives. A judge could hold off on executing a warrant until after certification. Copies or reproductions of the ballots might meet investigators’ needs. Law enforcement could watch the tabulation or a recount instead. The guide also sets out procedures a court should follow if it does grant a warrant, though Hasen hopes it never gets there. “Because all the things to do, if that does happen,” he said, “are really second-best solutions.”
Legal experts call a seizure during an election extreme and unlikely, since a judge has to sign off first. Retired federal Judge Philip Pro, former chief judge for the District of Nevada, said courts are watching. “Right now, the judiciary writ large has their antennae up, anticipating what might be coming down the pike,” he said. “They’re going to be prepared.” Judges, he added, will be “looking behind the curtain rather than simply relying on what is presented as being gospel.”
Maureen O’Connor, a retired chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, said warrant requests normally get handled in secret, with no public hearing or testimony. During an active election she wants that changed. “That deserves to be discussed in a courtroom on the record, with the judge asking questions of witnesses under oath,” she said. Both she and Pro belong to Keep Our Republic, a nonprofit that backs democracy and the rule of law.
