Four weeks before the November 3 midterms, the scoreboard on Donald Trump’s campaign against his own country’s election is finally legible. He ran six distinct plays: banishing international observers, attacking mail voting, demanding voter files from the states, redrawing the maps, dismantling the watchdogs, and dangling taxpayer money in front of voters.
Courts killed two of those plays. The other four are standing as Americans start voting.
The Observers Are Locked Out
For the first time since observation began in 2002, the United States will hold a federal election with no monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, because the administration simply never sent the invitation every White House before it had extended. The OSCE confirmed the snub on September 23 and called it regrettable, a break from commitments the US signed onto under the 1990 Copenhagen Document.
The organization observed 12 US federal elections, including the 2018 midterms during Trump’s first term. Democratic Reporter covered how the administration shut out the OSCE monitors that America had welcomed for nearly a quarter century.
The hypocrisy is on the record. In 2024, the US government publicly scolded Russia for dodging these same observers and bragged that America values their impartial assessments of our elections.
The Mail Voting Attack Died In Court
Trump signed an executive order in March directing the federal government to build its own list of eligible voters and telling the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on it. The Postal Service followed up in August with a rule letting it refuse ballots from any state that wouldn’t surrender its voter files, and Trump asked the Supreme Court to let the post office decide which Americans get a ballot.
The courts said no. A federal judge ruled that Congress never gave the Postal Service any authority over mail voting, and in mid September the Supreme Court refused to let the restrictions take effect before November, with only Justices Alito and Thomas dissenting.
Nearly a third of American voters cast ballots by mail. The man who spent a year calling that system a hoax voted by mail himself this year in Florida.
Judges Keep Throwing Out The Voter Data Lawsuits
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to force them to hand over complete voter registration files, claiming a 1960 civil rights law written to fight Jim Crow gives her that power. The targeting was never subtle, because of the first 29 lawsuits, only five went after states run by Republicans.
The plan has collapsed in court. Judges have now dismissed 26 of the lawsuits on the merits, Oklahoma settled, and only four cases remain pending, though the administration keeps appealing and the Sixth Circuit has already affirmed Michigan’s win.
One federal judge described the plan to pool that data into a federal database of names to purge as a dark theory. About a dozen Republican led states handed over their files voluntarily, so the database project is wounded, not dead.
The pretext behind all of it keeps evaporating on contact. This is the same administration whose Homeland Security department claimed thousands of noncitizens sat on Nevada’s voter rolls, a list the state checked and traced to exactly zero noncitizen voters.
The Maps Were The Move That Stuck
Trump didn’t bother hiding the redistricting play. He said Republicans were entitled to five more seats in Texas and hoped mid decade map drawing would hand the party eight to ten nationally.
A federal panel in El Paso found the new Texas map was a racial gerrymander that violated the 14th and 15th Amendments. The Supreme Court upheld the redrawn Texas map anyway in April, with all three liberal justices dissenting, and the 2026 election is being run on it.
Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina and Tennessee redrew their lines too, while California voters answered with Proposition 50. The net result is roughly nine new Republican leaning seats against six for Democrats, in the biggest wave of mid decade redistricting since the 1800s.
The Watchdogs Are Already Gone
Every one of these moves gets sold as election integrity, so it matters that the administration spent two years firing the people responsible for exactly that. It disbanded the National Security Council’s election security group, the intelligence community’s foreign influence center, the FBI’s foreign influence task force, and the Justice Department’s Election Day command posts.
CISA, the agency that protects election infrastructure, paused its election security work almost immediately after Trump took office, and his budget proposed cutting nearly $500 million more. CISA is the agency that called 2020 the most secure election in American history, a finding that got its director, Chris Krebs, fired by tweet.
The Money Is Flowing Right Now
At last month’s Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump promised a $5,000 payment to every adult citizen, but only if Republicans hold the House and Senate. With roughly 270 million American adults, his so called Trump dividend would cost about $1.35 trillion in public money, offered in exchange for an election result.
He didn’t wait for November to start spending. In the span of about ten days, the administration ran more than a dozen government funded ads promoting Trump, mailed $500 checks to nearly a million Affordable Care Act enrollees, and sent $90 to around 20 million seniors for Medicare premiums.
The Damage Is Already Done
American elections remain among the most scrutinized on Earth. The OSCE verified them for over two decades, Trump’s own cybersecurity agency vouched for 2020, and more than 60 courts, including judges he appointed, rejected his fraud claims.
Yet after two years of this, fewer than half of voters now expect a free and fair midterm election, according to a University of California San Diego survey. Trump lost most of these fights in court, but the fight over whether Americans trust their own elections is the one he’s winning.
