What the FBI Just Did in Ohio Demands Our Attention
The FBI’s raids on election infrastructure aren’t random. They’re a playbook.
Nine months is a long time to be away, but something happened in Ohio last Friday that pulled me back.
On June 12, FBI agents raided the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. They seized laptops. They showed up at the homes of OOC staff members to interrogate them.
The FBI said it was investigating alleged voter fraud. Unsurprisingly, they’ve offered zero evidence of this.
Let’s be clear: The OOC isn’t a government agency. Its employees aren’t government workers. The OOC a nonprofit coalition of 18 community organizations that registers voters and organizes nonpartisan civic participation across Ohio. They’ve been doing this great work for 20 years.
We’ve seen this film before, and we need to pay attention now:
The FBI’s Recent Anti-Election Activity
January 2026: Fulton County, Georgia. FBI agents raided Fulton County’s main election operations center. They seized thousands of records, including ballots from the 2020 presidential election. The search warrant was based on conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that Georgia’s own Republican Secretary of State has already debunked.[1]
March 2026: Maricopa County, Arizona. The FBI served grand jury subpoenas and took more than three dozen hard drives from the Arizona State Senate building. Those drives contained records from an audit of the 2020 election Maricopa County (where Phoenix is located).
May 2026: Milwaukee, Wisconsin. FBI agents showed up at the home of Milwaukee County’s election director. They also called, texted, and visited other current and former election officials across the city without warrants or other formal legal process. Federal agents, knocking on private doors, in a swing state. A pattern emerges.
Now they’ve come for Ohio.
Zoom Out From Each Headline: This is All Connected
It’s easy to miss one of these stories, or forget about the last one so the next one seems unrelated. But we know that the easiest time for someone to steal and election is before Election Day, and that’s exactly what this is about.
First, they go after the records. Fulton County. Maricopa County. The target is the physical records of past elections—ballots, audit data, documentation—all in a fool’s errand to prove “fraud” in an election that happened a half-decade ago.
Then, they go after the workers. Milwaukee election administrators, visited at home without a warrant or any other just cause. The Trump Administration knows this is intimidating; it knows they don’t have to arrest someone to do real damage to our elections, or election workers, and voter confidence.
Now, for the first time, they’re going after civil society. OOC employees are private citizens who help people register to vote and participate in our democracy. The FBI raided their offices and their homes. That’s a new and dangerous escalation.
Their Goal Isn’t Evidence. It’s Uncertainty.
The Trump Administration knows it doesn’t need to prove anyone at OOC actually committed a crime to suppress voting. They really don’t even need to press charges.
They just need enough of nonprofit organizations doing good work in key swing states to worry that registering voters might not be worth the risk of a federal agent knocking on their door.
They’re creating a chilling effect that can be effective whether or not their baseless investigations ever produce a single valid charge. The uncertainty itself is their goal, and it’s their weapon.
This is what election subversion looks like in this moment. Yes, they’re passing restrictive voting laws. Yes, they’re gerrymandering maps. But this is new: Federal agents at the doors of people who work on elections, months before voting begins this fall.
The Ohio Organizing Collaborative isn’t staying silent, and we can’t either. Organizers in Ohio have already launched Hands Off Ohio in direct response to the raids. Everyone should visit it to see how Ohio is fighting back, and how you can support them.
The most powerful thing authoritarians need is our silence. Don’t give it to them.
[1] The Fulton County search warrant affidavit, released after a court order, relied heavily on witnesses who are now Trump administration employees, including a former Trump campaign lawyer who participated in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.