A new report states that the administration of President Donald Trump has abandoned a longstanding U.S. practice dating back 24 years by failing to invite international observers to keep an eye on the November midterms, bringing Washington in line with Russia and Belarus.
Since 2002, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has been watching every U.S. federal election, including six midterm ones. However, it stated that the Trump administration had not sent an invitation for the vote on November 3, making that election the first federal one in over two decades to not have its observers.
MS NOW stated that the decision places Washington in a rare position alongside Russia and Belarus, both of which have also refused to invite OSCE observers to their most recent national elections. The OSCE had criticized Russia in August for once more declining to invite monitors to its parliamentary elections, while in Belarus observers were blocked from the 2025 presidential election.
The OSCE described the U.S. decision as "regrettable" and stated that it was in conflict with the commitments which the participating countries had made under the 1990 Copenhagen Document.
“Over more than two decades, ODIHR has built a constructive relationship with authorities and electoral stakeholders across the United States,” ODIHR Director Maria Telalian said.
“Election observation is not a judgment on a country or its institutions,” she added, continuing: “It provides voters, election administrators, contestants and the wider public with an independent and objective assessment of the electoral process.”
The spokesperson from the State Department justified the decision by stating that the OSCE “should focus its limited resources on elections where it can have the greatest impact.”
Human Rights Watch stated that the refusal might make it more difficult to have outside scrutiny of the midterms.
“The U.S. government has long criticized Russia and other governments for dodging external scrutiny of their elections,” Executive Director Philippe Bolopion said. “Now the Trump administration is mimicking that behavior.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told MS NOW that the decision “risks undermining public trust in America’s safe and secure election system.”
At the same time, the Justice Department is preparing for a much bigger federal monitoring operation of its own. It has declared that it intends to send up to 1,000 monitors to polling places all over the country, a record number of monitors whose purpose is to enforce federal election laws.
OSCE observers had kept a close watch on Trump's first midterm election in 2018 and again came to observe the 2024 presidential election, in which Trump was once again returned to the White House.
The move comes after a poll last month found that less than half of Americans expect midterm elections to be “free and fair.” UC San Diego national survey found that 49 percent of respondents said they are expecting a free and fair election process, while 23 percent said they did not expect them to be, and 28 percent said they didn’t know what to expect.
The pollsters' 2024 survey shows how much Americans' faith in the electoral system has declined under Trump. Before he took office, 77 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of Republicans, and 73 percent of independents expressed confidence in the process.