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ATLANTA – A coalition led by the NAACP is urging a judge to safeguard personal voter data that was recently confiscated by the FBI from an election facility near Atlanta.
According to the coalition, Georgia voters placed their trust in the state with their “sensitive personal information” upon voter registration. However, the January 28th raid, which resulted in the seizure of ballots and election-related documents from a Fulton County election site, has breached this trust. The organizations argue that this action undermines constitutional privacy protections and disrupts the fundamental right to vote, as detailed in a motion filed late Sunday.
The motion seeks a judicial order imposing restrictions on the government’s use of the collected data, limiting it strictly to the criminal investigation described in the search warrant affidavit. The request explicitly calls for barring the use of this data for voter roll updates, election management, or immigration proceedings.
Furthermore, the coalition demands that the court require the government to provide a comprehensive inventory of all seized documents and records, disclose the identities of individuals accessing these records beyond the investigation team, document any duplication of the records, and detail measures taken to protect the information.
As of Monday, the Department of Justice has not issued a response to the motion.
FBI agents arrived at the elections hub just south of Atlanta with a search warrant seeking documents related to the 2020 election in Fulton County, including: all ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners that tally the votes, electronic ballot images created when the ballots were counted and then recounted, and all voter rolls. The county has filed a motion seeking the return of the seized materials.
President Donald Trump has fixated on Fulton, a Democratic stronghold and the most populous county in the state, asserting without evidence that widespread voter fraud there cost him victory in Georgia in 2020.
An FBI agent’s affidavit presented to a magistrate judge to obtain the search warrant says the criminal investigation began with a referral from Kurt Olsen, who advised Trump as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss and now serves as Trump’s “director of election security and integrity” with a mission to investigate Trump’s loss.
The motion was filed by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law on behalf of the NAACP, Georgia and Atlanta NAACP organizations, and the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples Agenda. It notes that the seizure happened as the Justice Department has been seeking unredacted state voter registration rolls.
The Justice Department has sued at least 23 states and the District of Columbia to try to get them to hand over detailed voter information. The agency has said it is seeking the data as part of an effort to ensure election security, but Democratic officials and other critics worry that federal officials want to use the sensitive data for other purposes. Federal courts in several states have rejected the Justice Department’s attempts to get the records.
“These repeated efforts to access 2020 election records, including by the entity that now has custody of them, heightens concerns about the privacy and security of sensitive voter data and exacerbates the chill on voting rights,” the motion says.
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