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ATLANTA (AP) — The NAACP, alongside several other organizations, has petitioned a judge to safeguard personal voter data seized by the FBI from an election storage facility near Atlanta.
These groups contend that Georgia citizens entrusted the state with their “sensitive personal information” when registering to vote. However, the FBI’s seizure of ballots and election-related documents on January 28 from the Fulton County election center has breached this trust. According to their motion submitted late Sunday, this action violated privacy rights, infringed upon constitutional protections, and disrupted the right to vote.
The motion calls for the judge to impose “reasonable limits on the government’s use of the seized data.” It specifically requests that the data be used solely for the criminal investigation outlined in the search warrant affidavit, explicitly barring its use for voter roll maintenance, election administration, or immigration enforcement.
Furthermore, the organizations urge the judge to mandate the government to provide a detailed inventory of all seized documents and records. They also seek information on anyone who accessed the records beyond those implicated in the criminal investigation, details of any records copied, and descriptions of measures taken to secure the information.
As of Monday, the Department of Justice had yet to respond to inquiries regarding 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.