Civil rights groups sue to protect voter data FBI seized from Georgia office

Rights groups have sued to protect voter information that was seized by the FBI in a controversial raid in Georgia at the behest of Donald Trump in his renewed push to invalidate the 2020 election.

The NAACP and other civil rights organizations filed a motion on 15 February to “prohibit the Trump administration from misusing the voter information” taken from an elections warehouse in Fulton county, Georgia, late last month.

“Having already failed to overturn the valid results of the 2020 presidential election by invoking false claims of widespread voter fraud, promoting fake electors and inciting a violent insurrection, Trump and his minions are refusing to give up the ‘lost cause’, trampling even more voting and privacy rights in the process,” said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the groups involved, in a statement.

“Ironically, this is happening in the same jurisdiction where Trump pressured state elections officials to ‘find 11,870 votes’ in an effort to declare himself the victor in 2020. The voters of Fulton county, or anywhere in the country, should not be collateral damage in this partisan political warfare.”

The collection of groups includes the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the NAACP, the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP, the Atlanta branch of the NAACP, the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda and some individual members. The suit was filed with the US district court for the northern district of Georgia.

Trump suggested on a conservative podcast recently that Republican state officials should “take over” and “nationalize” elections in 15 states to protect the party from being voted out of office.

The FBI raid on 28 January is the latest move by the Trump administration to relitigate the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden and which election integrity experts have said is the most secure to date. Dozens of legal challenges brought by Trump’s allies to challenge his defeat have failed.

Nonetheless, Trump continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him. He has not questioned the integrity of the 2024 presidential race, which he won.

FBI agents served a criminal search warrant to obtain nearly 700 boxes of ballots and other election material from the Fulton county elections office, 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.