Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett is sounding the alarm for Black voters in Georgia amid calls by President Donald Trump to nationalize elections.
Barrett, who announced her run for secretary of state in January, sounded exasperated over the phone last Wednesday shortly after learning the FBI had raided Fulton County’s Election Hub and Operation Center in Union City.
“It’s just the Trump administration, once again, trying to distract from what’s going on in Minnesota, and it’s ridiculous,” she said in reference to protests following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by border patrol agents.
The FBI seized 700 boxes of 2020 election ballots during the raid. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, who was spotted at the scene, told reporters on Monday she was there at the behest of President Donald Trump.
Georgia Republicans, including Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, have praised the raid. Barrett and other Democrats have theorized the Trump administration and its Georgia GOP allies may use it as a pretext to take control of elections in Fulton County, the state’s most populous Democratic stronghold.
The Election Integrity Act of 2021 includes a provision that allows the State Election Board to appoint someone to oversee any county’s elections if it’s determined the local elections board isn’t doing its job effectively. The State Elections Board is a five-member body currently controlled by three members who’ve expressed skepticism about the results of the 2020 election in Georgia, members Trump has referred to as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”
The Democrat-led Fulton County Board of Commissioners filed a federal court motion on Wednesday to retrieve the thousands of ballots that the FBI removed. In the aftermath of the raid, Chairman Robb Pitts told reporters Wednesday morning that he’s been warned not to relax by a source he declined to name.
“Arrests are coming,” Pitts said he was told, echoing recent comments Trump made during the latest World Economic Forum event in Davos. “I won’t disclose who told me that, but they are knowledgeable in D.C.”
Barrett told Capital B Atlanta that Fulton County has become an epicenter for attempts by Republicans and the Trump administration to circumvent the will of Black voters in an effort to guarantee their own election victories.
She said her experience battling those efforts makes her uniquely qualified to become the next Democratic nominee for Georgia’s secretary of state.
Barrett and her fellow Democratic commissioners were held in contempt of court late last year for refusing to appoint and reappoint Republican nominees Jason Frazier and Julie Adams to the county’s board of elections.
Frazier has expressed controversial views about ensuring Republicans win elections. Adams, whose term on the board ended last year, previously refused to certify election results until forced to do so due to her concerns about potential voter fraud.
“I’ve been fighting to protect our elections in Georgia’s largest, most heavily Democratic county for years now,” Barrett told Capital B Atlanta in late January. “I’m running for secretary of state because I already know how to fight this. I already know how the election system works. And I’m ready to take the fight I’ve been waging in Fulton County, statewide.”
Barrett, 58, is a Buckhead resident and a self-taught computer programmer who worked in the tech industry most of her career. She has served on the county’s Board of Commissioners since defeating Republican incumbent Lee Morris in 2022.
She accused Republican leaders in Georgia of doing “everything they can” since the 2020 election to keep Black people from voting in the Peach State, including reducing the number of absentee ballot drop boxes via the Election Integrity Act of 2021 and removing thousands of people’s names from the voter rolls in conjunction with Georgia’s long-held voter list maintenance policy.
“We all know how Black election workers have been treated [in Fulton County], receiving death threats, being doxxed and all kinds of things, and that that is just unacceptable,” Barrett said, referring to former Fulton County poll workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman. A jury awarded the women $148 million in 2023 for the harm they suffered due to former New York Mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s ballot fraud lies about them following Trump’s 2020 election loss in Fulton County.
“Now Trump’s DOJ is coming after Georgia,” Barrett continued. “They’re trying to get your private data. And they’re willing to break the law to get it.”
Barrett’s top three policy initiatives include making it easier for Georgians to vote, in part, by establishing rules and procedures that every county board of elections must follow. She also wants to use the bully pulpit to keep conservative election integrity activists from accessing private voter data, including people’s Social Security numbers, to bolster claims of widespread voter fraud being a problem in Georgia.
“We need to not only make sure [Georgians] can vote, but we also need to make sure it’s easy for people to vote,” Barrett said. “MAGA in particular has done everything they can to make it harder, and we as a democracy should want the opposite.”
The secretary of state’s office also oversees the registering of new businesses and manages the state’s securities market. Barrett said she wants to update the state’s business registration systems, which she said are “outdated.”
“I’ve been using those systems myself for many, many years because I’ve owned several small businesses,” she said. “I think we need a modernization of those systems. I think we need to make it easier. … I think we can do a better job of ensuring that people are not engaged in fraudulent behavior and that citizens are not open to that.”
Barrett is competing for the Democratic nomination against fellow secretary of state candidates Adrian Consonery Jr., a voting rights activist, and Penny Brown Reynolds, a former Fulton County state judge and star of Family Court with Judge Penny.
Republican contenders for the office include Marietta business owner Kelvin King, Raffensperger’s chief operating officer Gabe Sterling, and GOP state lawmaker Tim Fleming, R-Covington.
Primary election day in Georgia is set for May 19.
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