NAACP asks judge to protect against 'misuse' of voter data seized by FBI
in Georgia's Fulton County
[February 17, 2026]
By KATE BRUMBACK
ATLANTA (AP) — The NAACP and other organizations are asking a judge to
protect personal voter information that was seized by the FBI from an
elections warehouse just outside Atlanta.
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 elections
hub “breached that guarantee, infringed constitutional protections of
privacy, and interfered 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 cited
in the search warrant affidavit. That includes prohibiting any efforts
to use it for voter roll maintenance, election administration or
immigration enforcement.
They also want the judge to order that the government disclose an
inventory of all documents and records seized, the identity of anyone
who has accessed the records outside of those involved in the criminal
investigation, any copying of the records and all efforts to secure the
information.
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond Monday to a
request for comment on 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.
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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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