NAACP Asks Judge to Safeguard Against Data Misuse

The NAACP and other civil rights groups are requesting that a judge protect personal voter information that was obtained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from an election hub in Fulton County, Georgia.

The organizations wrote in a motion filed on Feb. 15 that Georgia residents entrusted the state with their “sensitive personal information” when they registered to cast their ballot, with the Jan. 28 seizure of voter records and other election documents from the Fulton County elections center “breached that guarantee, infringed constitutional protections of privacy, and interfered with the right to vote.”

The petition asks the judge to “order reasonable limits on the government’s use of the seized data” and to bar the government from using the data for purposes separate from the criminal probe cited in the search warrant affidavit.

The motion additionally requests that the judge order the government to disclose an inventory of all documents and records captured, the identity of individuals who have accessed the information outside of those involved in the investigation, any copies of records, and all attempts to secure the records.

FBI agents arrived at the election warehouse with a search warrant seeking documents related to the 2020 election in Fulton County, which included tabulator tapes from scanners, electronic ballot images created when the ballots were counted and recounted, and all ballots.

President Donald Trump has previously claimed that voter fraud in the most populous county in Georgia led to his 2020 election 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, which points out that the raid happened concurrently with the U.S. Justice Department’s aims to obtain unredacted state voter registration rolls.

“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 states.