NAACP asks judge for protection from ‘misuse’ after FBI seizes Fulton County voter data

ATLANTA (AP) — The NAACP and other organizations are asking a judge to protect personal voter information seized by the FBI from an elections warehouse just outside Atlanta.

Read more: Fulton County asks court to return 2020 election documents seized by the FBI

Georgia residents entrusted the state with their “sensitive personal information” when they registered to vote, and the Jan. 28 seizure of ballots and other election documents from the Fulton County Election Center “violates that guarantee, violates constitutional protections for privacy, and is inconsistent with the right to vote,” the organizations said in a motion filed late Sunday.

The motion asks the judge to “order reasonable limits on the government’s use of the seized data” and to prohibit the government from using the data for purposes other than the criminal investigation mentioned in the search warrant affidavit. This includes prohibiting any efforts to use it to maintain voter rolls, administer elections, or enforce immigration laws.

They also want the judge to order the government to disclose a list of all documents and records seized, the identity of anyone who accessed the records outside of those involved in the criminal investigation, any copies of the records and all efforts made to secure the information.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond Monday to a request for comment on the proposal.

FBI agents arrived at the election center just south of Atlanta with a search warrant to obtain documents related to the 2020 elections in Fulton County, including: all ballots, tabulation tapes from scanners that counted votes, electronic ballot images created when ballots were counted and then recounted, and all voter lists. The governorate submitted a request to recover the seized materials.

He watches: Trump says Gabbard joined the FBI at Fulton County elections center at Bondi’s “insistance.”

President Donald Trump has focused his attention on Fulton, a Democratic stronghold and the state’s most populous county, asserting without evidence that widespread voter fraud there cost him victory in Georgia in 2020.

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” on assignment to investigate Trump’s loss, the affidavit that the FBI agent submitted to the judge to obtain the search warrant says.

The request was filed by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law on behalf of the Georgia NAACP, the Atlanta NAACP and the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda. It notes that the seizure occurred while the Justice Department was seeking the state’s unredacted voter registration rolls.

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The Justice Department has sued at least 23 states and the District of Columbia to try to get them to turn over detailed voter information. The agency said it is seeking the data as part of its effort to ensure election security, but Democratic officials and other critics worry that federal officials want to use sensitive data for other purposes. Federal courts in several states have rejected the Justice Department’s attempts to obtain the records.

“These repeated efforts to access 2020 election records, including by the entity that now holds them, raise concerns about the privacy and security of sensitive voter data and exacerbate the gridlock over voting rights,” the motion said.