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Mr. Raffensperger, in his memoir, said that Mr. Graham’s call to him, which came 10 days after Election Day, was baffling. “I didn’t understand why Senator Graham would interject himself into a neighboring state’s affairs,” he wrote.

Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, said that Mr. Graham told him he was worried that some Georgia counties might have approved invalid absentee ballots, “and he seemed to imply that we could audit all signatures and throw out the ballots from counties that had the highest frequency of error rates,” Mr. Raffensperger wrote. “But no state can do that.”

Ms. Willis’s office has indicated in court documents that prosecutors wanted to learn more about Mr. Graham’s role in Mr. Trump’s postelection strategy, and about who he spoke to on the Trump campaign team before or after he called Mr. Raffensperger. This line of inquiry would track with an effort to build a multi-defendant case that there was a broad criminal effort to violate Georgia election law, whether Mr. Graham ends up being one of those defendants or not.

“These are going to be very uncomfortable inquiries for the senator,” said Norman Eisen, a lawyer who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment. Ms. Willis, he said, “is allowed questioning that is nonlegislative, that is very important to the investigation,” including, he noted, questions about whether Mr. Graham asked that ballots be thrown out, or that Georgia’s election procedures or tallies be changed.

A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office declined on Thursday to comment on the judge’s order. Mr. Graham’s lawyers have been instructed to file a new brief with the appeals court by Oct. 11.