For the first time since international election monitoring began in the United States, the Trump administration has refused to invite observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to watch a federal election. The OSCE confirmed on September 23 that no invitation ever arrived for the November 3 midterms, ending a practice every administration of both parties has honored since 2002.
The organization called the decision regrettable and said it is not in line with commitments the United States accepted alongside 56 other participating nations under the 1990 Copenhagen Document, which obligates every member to open its elections to outside scrutiny. OSCE Parliamentary Assembly President Pere Joan Pons called it “a significant departure from an established democratic practice.”
The Observers Every President Welcomed, Even Trump
Since 2002, OSCE monitors have observed 12 federal elections in the United States, including six midterms. Their job is modest by design. They visit polling stations, assess how the vote is run, and publish a report. They do not interfere with voting, they have no enforcement power, and each state decides how much access they get.
Trump’s own first administration invited them to the 2018 midterms. They came back in 2024 and judged that election well run. This cycle, the group’s monitoring office said it was still waiting on an invitation that never came, and its public calendar now shows no American mission at all.
The Company America Just Joined
The only other governments keeping OSCE observers away from recent national elections are Russia and Belarus. Human Rights Watch warned that the decision fuels serious human rights fears around the upcoming vote, and pointed out that the United States blasted Russia in 2024 for refusing to cooperate with these very same observers, boasting at the time that America welcomed them to its own elections.
Even Switzerland, which chairs the OSCE this year, pressed Washington in bilateral talks to let the mission proceed as usual. It got nowhere. The administration, which has been openly hostile to the organization and has demanded it shrink its budget, reportedly spent months trying to get the group to withdraw its report on the 2020 election instead.
A Flimsy Excuse And A Blunt Diagnosis
Asked why no invitation went out, a State Department spokesperson claimed the OSCE should focus its limited resources on elections where it can have the greatest impact. That is the entire official justification for abandoning a practice the United States spent two decades holding up as proof of its democratic confidence.
Dan Baer, who served as US ambassador to the OSCE under President Obama, offered a blunter read. Refusing election observers, he said, is usually the move of governments operating from weakness, the ones that know “they have corrupt or unfair elections.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned the decision risks undermining public trust in an American election system that is safe and secure.
The Neutral Observers Are Out, And 1,000 DOJ Monitors Are In
The same administration that found no room for neutral international observers is building an unprecedented federal monitoring force of its own. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced the Justice Department will deploy about 1,000 election monitors to polling places in November, brushing it off as “just something that DOJ does.”
It is nothing of the sort. The department dispatched roughly 280 monitors during the 2022 midterms, and former Civil Rights Division officials have openly questioned how it could possibly recruit and train more than triple that number in time for Election Day.
The buildup comes as Trump keeps pushing unfounded claims that Democrats plan to cheat in November, refuses to rule out declaring a national emergency before the vote, and watches his Justice Department lose nearly two dozen of the more than 30 lawsuits it filed demanding sensitive state voter data. Democrats and election integrity experts have raised concerns about possible meddling, and the administration’s track record gives those fears teeth. This is the same government whose Homeland Security Department claimed 15,903 noncitizens were registered to vote in Nevada, a claim the state investigated and found completely false.
Transparency costs nothing to a government running clean elections, and the United States spent more than two decades proving that point to the world. This White House just told the world to stop watching while it stations a thousand of its own monitors at the polls. Democratic Reporter will be tracking what the administration does with them between now and November 3.
