Free and Fair

As Trump ominously calls for a Republican Election Integrity Army, it is clear what we really need: international election observers.

May 12, 2026

I see what you did there:

It is a very different thing to say that you will field an “election integrity army” as the chair of party campaign support than as the President of the United States. Will his “bigger and stronger” 2026 effort include federal agents or just smarmy GOP interns skulking around polling places?

This threat, according to AL.com, was apparently belatedly made in response to an announcement by Chuck Schumer last month that the Democrats would set up a task force, led by former Attorney General Eric Holder, who has spent his post-White House days addressing electoral fairness, to watch for voter suppression efforts nationwide.

Trump was not done with just this one message:

Trump attacked Holder’s record.

“Palestinian Chuck Schumer is hiring Eric Holder, famous for handing guns to Mexican cartels under the Barack Hussein Obama administration, as part of a Democrat-led ‘Election Integrity Group’ that will no doubt try to suppress Republican voters, and interfere in our Elections,” Trump wrote.

“Furthermore, Marc Elias, a terrible lawyer with a horrible track record, is also involved. This is the same disgusting individual who was responsible for the fake Russia dossier from a foreign nation to meddle in the 2016 Election, which I won in historic fashion. The Democrats are totally unhinged and we will not allow them to threaten the integrity of our Elections.”

As the DOJ comes to be fully captured by the President’s political machine, the idea that federal power will be used for voter intimidation is not unrealistic. And DOJ election monitoring is not unheard of; it has been common in states with a history of voter suppression, but the gutting of the Voting Rights Act undercuts the traditional rationale. And though three Republican governors rejected DOJ monitors in 2024, the Trump DOJ sent monitors to two states in the 2025 off-year election: reliably blue California and New Jersey. The New York Times covered the story:

Although election monitoring by the Justice Department is not uncommon, it will likely heighten tensions as voters weigh in on some of the nation’s most closely watched races. President Trump has pushed the Justice Department to pursue parts of his agenda, including going after his political enemies, which has eroded its traditional independence. Mr. Trump also blamed his 2020 election loss on rigged voting, although there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, but Mr. Trump and other Republicans have since¹ claimed it is rampant, particularly voting by mail, which is how most Californians vote. Democrats have called the argument a ruse for voter suppression.

“This administration has made no secret of its goal to undermine free and fair elections,” Brandon Richards, a spokesman for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, said in a statement. “Deploying these federal forces appears to be an intimidation tactic meant for one thing: suppress the vote.”

It is hard, given the sharp turn toward politically motivated prosecutions in the last month, to see any plans for DOJ monitors as functioning any other way.

But Trump’s post above was motivated, the claim goes, by the concern that the task force Schumer announced would be used to suppress Republican votes. And in a certain sense, that might be a reasonable suspicion. I imagine that nobody keeps guard of their wallet better than a pickpocket, after all.

This comes in the wake of unprecedented mid-decade redistricting that departs from the usual rationale of the U.S. Census results, efforts that are thus nakedly about partisan advantage. It comes at a time when both parties are accusing the other of acting to skew the vote, and where split decisions in different court jurisdictions only enflame the sense that all of our political system is partisan. In such an environment, the solution is not to field a bunch of party-chosen monitors to descend on polling places, potentially interfering with voters and gumming up the works of vote counting efforts. This was a debacle in 2020, with untrained, highly partisan individuals rabidly accusing innocent poll workers of malfeasance. If it goes badly this time, when even gerrymandering seems unlikely to stop a landslide loss for Republicans, the results could wholly upend our democratic system.

The solution to the problem that is brewing, would we accept one, is a little humiliating. We need to put our faith in international election monitors, the kind who speak soberly about “irregularities” when Robert Mugabe or Vladimir Putin win elections by inconceivable margins. We need the party-based monitors Democrats and Republicans are calling to stand down, or cooperate fully with trained outside monitors working from a methodology that had been well tested elsewhere on elections both fair and rigged.

In fact, we have had international election monitors here for many election cycles. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly provides election monitoring in Europe and elsewhere, and it has observed the last ten American elections. Its detailed report on the 2020 election was a credible source indicating that the vote was free and fair.

The U.S. has allowed OSCE monitors for every election here since 2004, in a process that begins with an invitation from the Department of State. However, their presence has not always been unimpeded. In 2012, for the first time they faced obstacles when Texas officials tried to bar monitors from polling places.

Will the Trump Administration allow observers into the country in 2026? Will local officials comply?

One thing we can all do to ensure free and fair elections this year is to pay attention to the OSCE process. Be on the alert for news about their planning and responses from the Administration or the GOP. If the Administration balks or fails to invite OSCE in, call your representatives. Talk about the work that these observers do. Ask local news outlets to cover OSCE monitoring in your area (with roughly 100 observers, they will obviously “spot check” our system). Amplify their findings once they are released.

It could not be more important, and in theory at least, it is in everyone’s interest. Everybody seems to agree that our elections may be compromised, even if we do not agree on why. A surge of impartial election monitors, trained in a strong methodology and dedicated only to ensuring that votes are not suppressed or fraudulently cast, could help us from descending into acrimony, cynicism or worse once we reach the first Wednesday in November. As accusations are traded across the aisle, our future as a democratic nation, perhaps even a nation at all, could depend on it.

1. The implication that Republican accusations of voter fraud are something new to the Trump era is flatly untrue. Throughout the 2000s, Republican operatives like now-Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and former FEC member Hans von Spakovsky made repeated accusations of voter fraud that have, in their own right, undermined trust in our democracy.