By: Mark Sawyer from The Dispatch
For the 2026 midterms, Justice Department observers are in, while international observers are out.
To vote in colonial America, men stood in front of their neighbors, political party representatives, and often candidates themselves to announce their choice aloud. This practice of viva voce voting endured in some states until 1872, at which point paper ballots became the norm. Today, state election codes preserve the tradition of open access for election observers, meaning that voters are likely to see a number of silent, clipboard-carrying observers standing in the corner of their local gymnasium voting center next Tuesday.
What voters won’t see is the significant effort, and occasional political controversy, behind the mobilization of those tens of thousands of observers. For its part, the Department of Justice committed to significantly expand its typical Election Day observation efforts and deploy 1,000 election monitors in what Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, described as business as usual. However, the DOJ has been heavily engaged in the administration’s sweeping effort to identify voting fraud, a departure from the civil rights division’s traditional role in ensuring access to voting by people with disabilities or non-English speakers.
In another departure from standard practice, the DOJ will also use criminal prosecutors as monitors. While DOJ monitors have observed elections for civil rights violations since 1965, recent remarks from DOJ leadership about voter fraud and the department’s adherence to the president’s agenda have voting rights advocates claiming the observers may be intending to intimidate and interfere with voters.
After nearly six years of rhetoric about rigged elections and noncitizen voting after the 2020 election, the widespread nature of such discourse may discourage some Republicans from voting at all, polling has found. Recent polling from political research firm Cygnal shows that two-thirds of Republican voters are not more likely to vote for politicians who talk about stolen elections. Despite this, a majority of Republicans and Democrats expressed confidence that midterm votes will be counted as intended.
To keep watch over this year’s midterms, Republican and Democratic party officials touted record-breaking recruitment numbers of poll watchers in interviews with The Dispatch, with more than 5,000 Democratic poll watchers recruited in Pennsylvania alone. And for the first time in 20 years, the United States will not invite international election observers to monitor the midterm elections. Voters may not notice these changes to election observation at individual voting centers, but they reflect a shift in what constitutes a real threat to free and fair elections.
The DOJ has historically deployed monitors tasked with looking for violations of federal election law and civil rights law, such as polling places that lack adequate language or disability assistance for voters. However,1,000 monitors represents a notable increase from the DOJ’s usual Election Day footprint. For context, the DOJ had 388 observers during the 2022 midterms, according to a DOJ official’s statement to PBS News. The NAACP sued the DOJ on October 16 over the planned monitoring program, claiming that the program and the DOJ’s statements needlessly intimidate voters. However, there are roughly 100,000 polling locations across the United States, making even the deployment of 1,000 monitors unlikely to be noticed by voters.
Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and former DOJ and Biden White House official focused on voting rights, said the fears of interference or intimidation are unfounded and stem from a misperception that DOJ monitors have special privileges. “They’re folks in suits or khakis standing in the back of the room watching,” Levitt told The Dispatch. “These folks don’t have magical powers. They have the authority, the legal authority, that any member of the public has to observe.” What’s more, state law gives election officials running polling stations significant authority to kick out disruptive or intimidating observers, even if they’re affiliated with the federal government. “The moment there’s the first whiff that somebody’s doing something other than standing quietly in the classroom, they’re going to be gone,” Levitt said.
This scenario played out in Laramie County, Wyoming, during the primaries. Election officials at polling stations denied two DOJ monitors seeking to interview voters and inspect vote-counting machines, both of which are activities prohibited for outside observers in Wyoming. The DOJ monitors’ behavior was sufficiently concerning to local election officials that the governor and state attorney general met with Dhillon to protest the monitors’ behavior. Dhillon disputed the Wyoming clerks’ account in an earlier statement to The Dispatch. “[The observers] asked routine questions. … At no point did they ask when the county acquired election equipment, nor did they ask to inspect tabulators. They received no complaints regarding their monitoring activity.”
As for the DOJ using criminal prosecutors to monitor elections, Levitt said it’s about headcount rather than intimidation, especially since prosecutors are visually and legally the same as any other DOJ monitor. “They looked around, they found 200 civil litigators who were willing to go, [and] they said, ‘Well, crap! The boss promised 1,000. Where are we going to get 1,000?’ And then they went digging for other people in the field.”
Partisan poll watchers have historically been the most common type of observer in U.S. elections. According to Jonathan Stonestreet, senior associate director of democracy programs at the Carter Center, the United States is a somewhat unique democracy in that “we have always relied on partisan poll watchers as the transparency of our election process” and as a check for partisan interference, rather than relying just on independent observers.
For Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoon, the state party’s election integrity operation is intended both to ensure election law is followed uniformly and to boost Republican turnout. “I think it’s really important for those hesitant voters to see that we are doing everything we can to make sure that it’s a fair process and that their vote is going to count,” McKoon told The Dispatch. “Because I don’t want that person sitting on the sidelines.”
Staffing and volunteer recruitment numbers suggest that both parties have invested heavily in recruiting party-affiliated volunteers at the polls. The Republican National Committee (RNC) has deployed election integrity directors in 22 states and recruited more than 21,000 volunteers to serve as poll workers, constituting what Ally Triolo, the RNC’s election integrity communications director, called “one of the largest election integrity operations in party history.”
Democrats are similarly leaving nothing to chance, though research from the Bipartisan Policy Center indicates Democrats are much more concerned about eligible voters being turned away from the polls and attempts to overturn results after ballots are counted than they are about the mechanisms they use to vote. In Pennsylvania, a Democratic Party official told The Dispatch that the state party has attorneys prepositioned in 60 of 67 counties to provide guidance and raise legal challenges based on any irregularities raised by its poll watchers. The state party also doubled its voter protection staff from the 2022 midterm cycle, deployed them earlier, and, as a result, recruited 50 percent more poll watchers. In a statement to The Dispatch, the state party official attributed the increase in part to the fact that volunteers “are aware of the threats coming out of this administration toward our fundamental freedoms, and want to do what they can to help ensure every Pennsylvanian has the opportunity to make their voice heard and their vote counted.”
Some of the usual observers of U.S. elections won’t be present this year. The Trump administration declined to invite international election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), breaking two decades of tradition. The United States is one of the OSCE’s 57 member states, and Americans regularly observe foreign elections with OSCE missions as part of member states’ collaboration on political, economic, and human rights issues. Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire called the administration’s move “deeply antithetical to the spirit of freedom, democracy and transparency that defines our elections.” The move aligns with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s directive to diplomats last year that they stop commenting on the fairness and integrity of foreign elections.
James De Witt, who has observed elections with the OSCE and ran U.S. taxpayer-funded programs to help improve election systems around the world, argued that an additional layer of observation costs little and adds credibility, especially in tight races. “It’s a shame because unlike Russia or Belarus, who are also refusing observers over the past years, I think our elections in the U.S. can withstand the scrutiny. So we should invite that scrutiny,” De Witt told The Dispatch.
While there won’t be international observers for the 2026 midterms, nonpartisan groups have trained hundreds of observers in the states that allow them. Observe New Mexico Elections organized more than 300 observers drawn from local communities, a choice that helps allay some election officials’ initial suspicion when the observers show up. “People seem to now trust us that we really are a nonpartisan organization that wants to care about process, not outcome, and that wants to watch the whole thing,” the group’s co-lead, Carmen López, told The Dispatch.
And in the American tradition, voters worried about the security and integrity of the nation’s elections can go to a polling place and watch the whole thing for themselves. According to López, “we are interested in showing people all of the work that goes into putting on an election and how difficult it is to do anything outside of the norm” that might affect a contest’s outcome.
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