DOJ to send monitors to 6 Georgia counties with Democratic majorities

The U.S. Department of Justice has notified several Georgia counties it intends to station monitors there on Election Day.

Bibb, Cobb, Chatham, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties have received notifications from the Justice Department. Each of those counties has produced solid wins for Democrats in recent elections.

The Justice Department routinely sends election monitors to polling locations to ensure compliance with laws and that voters’ rights are protected. But given the Trump administration’s actions to assert more federal control over elections and investigate the president’s 2020 election grievances, the notices have raised concerns among Democrats and some election officials about what the monitors might try to do in November.

The Justice Department has played a central role in the administration’s election efforts. In January, the Justice Department raided an elections warehouse in south Fulton County, seizing hundreds of boxes of ballots and other documents related to the 2020 election. Armed with a criminal warrant, FBI agents carted the boxes away, but nothing further has come of the investigation.

The department has sued 30 states, including Georgia, seeking sensitive voter data. It’s lost every case that has been ruled on.

More recently, it’s sued election officials in California seeking to block the state from counting mail-in ballots for the midterms from people the federal government deems “likely” noncitizens until their immigration status is confirmed. And on Thursday, the DOJ sought to preemptively block certification of Alaska’s Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses.

Chatham County election officials received their monitoring notice by email on Tuesday. The correspondence, sent to Board of Elections Chairman Tom Mahoney and Elections Supervisor Billy Wooten, reads that monitors will “only observe” and “do not intrude or interfere in any way in the voting process.”

The notice requested the scheduling of a virtual meeting to discuss the monitoring effort.

Some Chatham election staffers were alarmed by the notice, Wooten said, fearing the monitoring would mean armed federal law enforcement at polling places. He’s assured them the federal monitors will act much like those representing the political parties, who observe every election.

“Our people have to understand that their No. 1 priority is the voters, and voting never stops,” he said.

A similar notice was sent to Cobb officials, according to correspondence obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In August, Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said the DOJ planned to dispatch about 1,000 monitors across the nation.

Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels said in a statement the department will be in all 50 states “doing the routine election monitoring the department has done for decades.”

She did not specify if the department intended to send monitors to any other counties in Georgia or how the DOJ chooses jurisdictions to monitor.

“All monitors must meet the same legal and ethical requirements, including that they not interfere with the voting process,” Pels said. “Every monitor has the same role: observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department, which the Department will review after Election Day and act where appropriate.”

Previously, monitors were limited to just that — observation. In Wyoming, however, Republican Gov. Mark Gordon expressed concerns about the behavior of monitors in the primaries, describing it as “very odd.” Local election officials in Wyoming said two monitors attempted to interview voters and examine voting machines.

Under the Biden administration, the DOJ deployed monitors in Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties in the 2022 midterms. Monitors were also dispatched to Bibb, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties in the 2024 presidential election.

During Trump’s first term, monitors were deployed in Fulton and Gwinnett counties in the 2020 election.