The raid continues the Trump administration’s pattern of looking for voter fraud, which many experts say is minimal in the U.S.
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Federal law enforcement officials on Thursday raided the offices of an Ohio organizing group that ran one of the state’s biggest 2024 voter registration efforts, seizing computers and other materials from the group’s Cleveland office, according to people familiar with the law enforcement action.
The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is a two-decade-old community activist group that describes itself as “organizing everyday Ohioans, building transformative power organizations for racial, social, and economic justice.” The group registered more than 100,000 Ohioans to vote in the 2024 elections and was active in organizing against Republicans’ 2025 redistricting efforts in the state.
The warrants executed Thursday appeared to focus on the group’s 2024 voter registration efforts, according to the people familiar with the action. Prentiss Haney, a former executive director of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative who sits on the group’s board, said that around 25 FBI agents arrived at the office to seize the devices.
The Justice Department declined to provide details about the raid.
“Search warrants are authorized by a judge, and anything said by any organization or others in the media is unfounded speculation, as the target of any investigation is not privy to the search warrant affidavit until after indictment,” a Justice Department official said.
Separately, Haney said, the group estimates that more than 100 FBI and Department of Homeland Security agents fanned across the state on Thursday and arrived at the homes of people affiliated with the collaborative.
Haney said these agents demanded to talk to the residents. They did not have subpoenas or warrants, he added.
“The only thing we can think is that this is a political act to try and intimidate people from voting,” said Haney, who was not at his home or office at the time of the raid and did not interact with law enforcement. “There is no basis for this, especially with the kind of force they brought.”
The focus on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative marks the latest front in the Trump administration’s efforts to investigate and prosecute what it depicts as voter fraud around the country. The efforts have most heavily focused on determining whether noncitizens are voting and whether jurisdictions are allowing votes cast on behalf of deceased people.
Many election officials and voting rights activists say there is very little voting fraud in the United States, and Democrats say Trump officials are seeking a pretext to challenge results they don’t like.
President Donald Trump has publicly sought to undermine trust in the election process, claiming with no evidence that large numbers of noncitizens and dead people are casting ballots in favor of Democrats. Most recently, he declared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that California’s primary election last week was “rigged” and “crooked,” walking out of the interview when host Kristen Welker challenged those assertions.
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The Justice Department has demanded voter roll data from states and sued those that have not complied. Officials have also launched a criminal investigation in Fulton County, Georgia. Trump has repeatedly attributed his narrow 2016 loss in Georgia to voter fraud, a claim that Republican state officials have rejected.
The Justice Department has also sought to prosecute noncitizens whom Trump has claimed are voting illegally. The department has struggled to meet the president’s demands for more action on this front, largely because the types of rampant voter fraud that the president describes have not been found.
The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have been working together on many of these voter investigations. When DOJ accesses voter data, DHS can help determine whether the people on the rolls are citizens.
Last week, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles said his office had opened “multiple election fraud investigations.” The prosecutor, Bill Essayli, did not elaborate on the nature of the investigations, and he cited no evidence suggesting that fraud had occurred.
Despite all these investigations, it has been unusual for the administration to target nonprofits, although some individuals working for these groups have occasionally been prosecuted.
In 2017, a canvasser working for the Ohio Organizing Collaborative pleaded guilty to state charges of fraudulently registering more than three dozen people to vote. And last month, federal prosecutors in California charged a Los Angeles organizer with allegedly paying homeless people to register.
In October 2025, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said he had referred to the Justice Department information about more than 1,000 noncitizens who had apparently registered illegally to vote in the state.
But Rep. Shontel M. Brown (D-Ohio) slammed federal agents’ raid on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, calling it a part of the administration’s efforts to “to attack our elections and perpetuate more myths of voter fraud.”
“My office has contacted the FBI demanding information, and I am deeply concerned that this is an effort to use federal law enforcement to intimidate and halt voter registration and organizing efforts,” Brown said in a statement. “This is an unprecedented attack on democracy: these raids must end immediately.”
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