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ATLANTA — 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.

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.

Former President Barack Obama this weekend appeared to drop an otherworldly bombshell: Extraterrestrials exist.

“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” Obama said in a podcast released Saturday. “There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

The comments — coming in the 44th minute of a 47-minute interview with a popular liberal podcaster — sparked an outsize reaction on social media, including from UFO believers convinced the truth is out there and that government leaders have spent decades concealing it.

It was also notable what didn’t happen, at least in official Washington. Political pundits didn’t discuss Obama’s comments on Sunday’s roster of talk shows. His foes didn’t rush to mock or condemn him; his allies didn’t jump to support him. Many mainstream media outlets initially ignored his comments on aliens while transcribing his other podcast remarks.

In interviews, lawmakers and Capitol Hill staff members offered an explanation: The paranormal has become normal. They pointed to mounting political attention given to unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs — the term that has replaced UFOs — and polls that show a growing belief in extraterrestrials. Fifty-six percent of Americans believe that aliens exist, according to a November poll conducted by YouGov.

Obama on Sunday night largely walked back his unearthly remarks, suggesting that he was offering a pithy response in the spirit of the podcast’s “lightning round” and that he was simply performing cosmic math.

“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” Obama wrote on Instagram. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

Not long ago, the former president’s 24-hour dalliance with E.T.s would have represented a political earthquake, liability, or both. When Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic congressman from Ohio, affirmed at a 2007 presidential debate that he believed he had seen an unidentified flying object, Time magazine dubbed the comments one of the “screwups” of that political campaign cycle. Debate moderator Tim Russert then asked whether Obama, at the time a Democratic senator from Illinois, believed in extraterrestrial life, too.

“I don’t know, and I don’t presume to know,” Obama responded, quickly pivoting from the question. “What I know is there is life here on Earth, and that we’re not attending to life here on Earth.”

At the time, about a third of Americans believed in UFOs, according to an Associated Press/Ipsos poll released that month.

But the political conversation has steadily shifted. Beginning in 2017, the New York Times and other media outlets have run reports on secret federal programs that have studied unusual, seemingly inexplicable phenomena. Government agencies have released videos of aircraft that appeared to defy the laws of physics.

It’s a “legitimate question now,” former President Bill Clinton said in a 2022 appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden.

That curiosity is bipartisan. The GOP-led House Oversight Committee in 2024 held a hearing on “exposing the truth” about unidentified aerial phenomena, citing reports by naval aviators and government officials who claim to have witnessed or received reports of strange vehicles. Marco Rubio, the nation’s secretary of state and national security adviser, is among the now-dozens of officials and lawmakers who have demanded more information.

“We have people with very high jobs in the U.S. Government that are either (a) liars; (b) crazy; or (c) telling the truth, and two of those three options are not good,” Rubio said in a Fox News interview in December, commenting on statements that he said he had heard while serving in the U.S. Senate. “I don’t know the answer.”

Officials across multiple administrations have said they are unaware of proof of celestial beings.

“I certainly wasn’t privy to any intelligence about alien life forms and believe me, I asked about it!” Sean Savett, the spokesperson for the White House National Security Council during the Biden administration, wrote in a text message on Sunday.

Obama in 2021 said that he prioritized finding answers about extraterrestrial life as president, alluding to the conspiracy theories about Area 51 — a military base in Nevada that has been depicted in Hollywood productions as harboring alien technology and even alien beings.

“When I came into office, I asked … ‘Is there the lab somewhere where we’re keeping the alien specimens and space ship?’ And, you know, they did a little bit of research and the answer was no,” Obama said in a 2021 appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden.

The current occupant of the Oval Office has been less publicly curious about interstellar matters. President Donald Trump told ABC News in 2019 that he had a “brief meeting” on UFOs during his first administration and that he didn’t particularly believe in aliens.

While the White House press office did not respond to questions Sunday about Obama’s comments or whether Trump had updated his views, current staff members said they weren’t aware of Trump discussing the topic.

“While POTUS often talks about things outside of my orbit, he’s never talked about things outside Earth’s orbit,” a White House official texted Sunday.