Civil rights groups are urging a federal judge to step in after the FBI carted away ballots and voter records from a metro Atlanta elections facility, warning that the sweep has placed private voter data at risk.
In a motion filed late Sunday, the NAACP alongside allied organizations argued that Georgia voters handed over deeply personal information to the state with the expectation it would be safeguarded. The Jan. 28 seizure at the Fulton County elections warehouse, they contend, shattered that trust. By taking ballots and related records, the groups say the government “breached that guarantee, infringed constitutional protections of privacy, and interfered with the right to vote.”
Their request is twofold. First, they want the court to “order reasonable limits on the government’s use of the seized data,” restricting its use strictly to the criminal inquiry referenced in the warrant. They are asking the judge to bar any attempt to deploy the material for voter roll maintenance, election administration, immigration enforcement or any purpose beyond the stated investigation.
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Second, the organizations are demanding transparency. They want a full inventory of everything taken, the names of anyone who has accessed the records outside the criminal probe, disclosure of any copies made, and a detailed account of how the information is being secured.
The Department of Justice did not respond Monday to a request for comment, the AP indicated in a report.
Federal agents executed the search warrant at the Fulton County elections hub, located just south of Atlanta, seeking records tied to the 2020 presidential election. According to court filings, the warrant covered all ballots, scanner tabulator tapes, digital ballot images generated during counting and recounting, and complete voter rolls. Fulton County officials have separately moved to have the seized materials returned.
The dispute follows long-running claims by President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly targeted Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold and Georgia’s most populous county. He has asserted, without evidence, that widespread fraud there cost him the state in 2020.
An FBI affidavit submitted to secure the warrant traces the criminal investigation to a referral from Kurt Olsen, an attorney who advised Trump during efforts to overturn his 2020 loss. Olsen now serves as Trump’s “director of election security and integrity” with a stated mission of investigating the election outcome.
The latest motion was brought by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law on behalf of the NAACP, its Georgia and Atlanta branches, and the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples Agenda. The filing highlights that the seizure occurred while the Justice Department has been pressing states for access to unredacted voter registration rolls.
Nationwide, the department has sued at least 23 states and the District of Columbia in attempts to obtain detailed voter data. Federal officials maintain the effort is aimed at protecting election security. Democratic leaders and other critics counter that the breadth of the requests raises the specter of misuse. Courts in several states have already turned back the department’s attempts to compel disclosure.
“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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