Each county has backed Democratic candidates by wide margins in recent elections. The notices have prompted questions from Democrats and some election officials amid the Trump administration’s broader efforts to expand federal involvement in elections and revisit claims about the 2020 presidential vote.

The Justice Department says its monitors will observe voting, watch for possible violations of federal law and report concerns to the department for review after Election Day. Spokesperson Kiersten Pels said monitors must follow legal and ethical requirements and may not interfere with voting.

Chatham County election officials received their notice by email Tuesday. The message, sent to Board of Elections Chairman Tom Mahoney and Elections Supervisor Billy Wooten, said monitors would “only observe” and would not intrude on or interfere with the voting process. It also requested a virtual meeting to discuss the monitoring.

Wooten said some election staffers initially feared the notice meant armed federal officers would be stationed at polling places. He told them the monitors would be similar to observers representing political parties, who are present during elections.

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

The Justice Department has not said whether it will send monitors to other Georgia counties or how it selected these jurisdictions. In August, Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division, said the agency planned to send about 1,000 monitors nationwide. Pels said the department would conduct routine election monitoring in all 50 states, as it has for decades.

Election monitoring has been a longstanding federal practice, but recent events have heightened scrutiny of the effort. In January, the FBI seized hundreds of boxes of ballots and other records from a south Fulton County elections warehouse as part of an investigation into the 2020 election. The department has also sued states, including Georgia, seeking sensitive voter information; it has lost every case that has been decided.

There have also been questions about how monitors conduct themselves. During Wyoming’s primary elections, local officials said two federal monitors tried to interview voters and examine voting machines. Republican Gov. Mark Gordon called their conduct “very odd.”

Federal monitors were sent to Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties during the 2022 midterms, and to Bibb, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett during the 2024 presidential election. During President Donald Trump’s first term, monitors were assigned to Fulton and Gwinnett in 2020.

The notices come as confidence in election administration is a concern for some Georgia voters. One in four likely voters in a recent statewide poll said they were not confident the midterms would be conducted fairly.