Trump Cuts International Election Monitors From Midterms Amid Sweeping Hunt for Noncitizens on Voter Rolls

The Trump administration has declined to invite international observers to monitor next month's midterm elections, ending a practice that has been in place for every US federal election since 2002.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which has observed 12 US federal elections, says it received no invitation for the 3 November vote.

The decision comes as newly released records detail a federal investigation that drew on tens of millions of voter records to identify suspected noncitizen registration and voting. Democrats have warned that excluding the observers risks undermining public trust in the result.

No Invitation for the First Time in Two Decades

The OSCE's election monitoring arm, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), and its Parliamentary Assembly announced on 23 September that Washington had not invited them. Since 2002, the OSCE has observed 12 US federal elections, including six midterms, according to the organisation.

The OSCE said the decision was not in line with commitments the United States made under the OSCE's 1990 Copenhagen Document, which requires participating states to invite election observers.

'Election observation is not a judgment on a country or its institutions,' said ODIHR director Maria Telalian, adding that her office regretted it would not be able to continue its work during the midterms. Pere Joan Pons, president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, said the decision 'represents a significant departure from an established democratic practice'.

In 2022, OSCE observers examined election administration, voter registration, electoral maps, election law and media coverage across the country.

State Department Cites 'Limited Resources'

The State Department said the OSCE 'should focus its limited resources on elections where it can have the greatest impact', Truthout reported. The administration has previously demanded that the 57-member body cut its budget and reform, or face a US withdrawal.

At an OSCE ministerial meeting in Vienna in December 2025, State Department official Brendan Hanrahan criticised the organisation's 'public facing work' and said it should stop 'dictating national social policy'.

Truthout reported that the decision places the United States alongside Russia and Belarus as the only OSCE members to have rejected the organisation's election monitoring.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the move 'unprecedented' and said it 'risks undermining public trust' in the US election system. Dan Baer, who served as US ambassador to the OSCE under Barack Obama, said that, in his view, refusing observers was usually something countries did from a position of weakness.

Millions of Voter Records Searched

The decision comes in the same election cycle as the administration's campaign against alleged noncitizen voting, although no link between the two has been established. Internal records released on 7 October by the advocacy group Democracy Forward show that Homeland Security Investigations, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), ingested 50.6 million records from a Justice Department dataset, CNN reported.

A further 48.4 million records were obtained by Heather Honey, a senior counsellor to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, through sources described in the records only as 'independent sources of information'.

The figures are record counts, not necessarily unique individuals. The Justice Department data may include unredacted voter lists that more than a dozen Republican-led states handed over voluntarily. The department has sued 30 other states to force them to share their rolls.

By late May, investigators had opened 418 voter fraud cases and made 64 administrative arrests, and 318 of the cases had not been referred for prosecution. The records show that HSI considered using undercover agents against organisations it suspected of helping noncitizens register, focusing on New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and that many reviews of such groups found no wrongdoing.

In July, Mullin claimed his department had identified about 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote across four states, a figure officials in those states have repeatedly disputed. New Jersey said the same month that about 6,600 noncitizens had been mistakenly registered because of a motor vehicle system error, and that around 400 were believed to have voted.

Documents also show that officials discussed feeding state voter roll data into ELITE, a Palantir-supported tool used by ICE. Palantir said voter roll data had never been integrated into the system. Status updates on the investigations were shared with White House officials from July.

'It appears the president and his allies want to pick their voters,' said Skye Perryman, chief executive of Democracy Forward. A DHS spokesperson said the department had been 'incredibly transparent' about acquiring and analysing publicly available voter files.

Federal Monitors In, International Observers Out

While international observers have been left out, the administration is seeking to send 1,000 federal monitors to polling sites this cycle, a major expansion of previous Justice Department monitoring, according to Truthout.

Those monitors are part of a domestic federal operation and are not a substitute for independent international observation. Critics have also raised concerns about threats to deploy ICE agents at polling places.

Democracy Docket, the voting rights outlet founded by lawyer Marc Elias, described the OSCE decision as the 'latest ominous sign that the U.S. is backsliding on democracy'.

The OSCE stressed that election observation 'is not a judgment on a country or its institutions'. The midterms will be the first US federal elections since 2002 for which the organisation has not received an invitation.