Trump Blocks International Board From Conducting Oversight of Midterm Elections

For the first time in more than two decades, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) will not conduct oversight of the upcoming midterm elections after the Trump administration effectively blocked them from doing so, raising yet more alarm over the administration’s rapid erosion of free and fair elections in the U.S.

President Donald Trump has declined to invite the OSCE to witness the elections, which the group has done for every federal election since 2002.

The OSCE is an international group of 57 states, largely in the global North, most of which are located in Europe. The United States is a member country. The organization is a partner group to the UN, and was established in the 1970s to address issues of human rights, conflict prevention, and election integrity.

This mandate includes conducting oversight of elections in member countries. During the 2022 midterm elections, for instance, the organization sent a group of observers to examine components of the election like its administration, voter registration, the drawing of electoral maps, election law, and media coverage.

The U.S. joins only Russia and Belarus in rejecting the OSCE’s election monitoring.

On Tuesday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) said that Trump’s rejection of the monitors is “unprecedented.”

“[T]he Trump Administration’s failure to continue this practice is yet another step that risks undermining public trust in America’s safe and secure election system,” she said in a statement.

Democracy Docket, a media platform founded by voting rights attorney Marc Elias, called the move the “latest ominous sign that the U.S. is backsliding on democracy” when it first reported on the development last month.

“Refusing election observers is usually something that countries in a position of weakness do, when they know that they have corrupt or unfair elections,” Dan Baer, a U.S. ambassador to the OSCE under Barack Obama, told MS NOW.

The State Department said the OSCE “should focus its limited resources on elections where it can have the greatest impact.”

The move comes as the Trump administration is seeking to deploy 1,000 monitors to poll sites this election cycle. This is a massive expansion of previous Department of Justice monitoring efforts, and comes as the Trump administration has sought to majorly disrupt the elections via sweeping restrictions to mail-in voting and threats to deploy ICE agents at polling sites.

The Trump administration has also picked ideological fights with the OSCE, of which the U.S. is a major financial contributor. Last year, the Trump administration issued an ultimatum to the group to undertake reforms or else face U.S. withdrawal from the group, Security and Human Rights Monitor reported.

In the OSCE’s ministerial meeting in Vienna last year, senior State Department official Brendan Hanrahan complained that the group’s “public facing work reads like a catalog of ideological projects that many of our societies have rejected or reversed, from opposing common sense asylum reform to misguided efforts to eliminate fossil fuels.” Hanrahan demanded that the group cut its annual budget, stop “dictating national social policy,” and engage Russia in conflict management.