The administration of President Donald Trump has broken with a U.S. practice in place for more than two decades by declining to invite international observers to monitor the November midterms, a decision that places Washington in the same company as Russia and Belarus, both of which have also kept monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) out of their most recent national elections.

Since 2002, the OSCE has observed every U.S. federal election, including six midterm contests. According to a report by MS NOW, the administration did not send an invitation for the November 3 vote, making it the first U.S. federal election in more than two decades to proceed without OSCE observers.

The decision leaves the United States in rare company. The OSCE — a 57-member security body spanning North America, Europe and Asia, with the United States among its participating states — criticized Russia in August after it once again declined to invite monitors to its parliamentary elections, while observers were blocked from Belarus's 2025 presidential election.

The OSCE described the U.S. decision as "regrettable" and said it conflicted with the commitments that participating countries made under the 1990 Copenhagen Document, the OSCE accord in which they — the United States included — pledged to invite international observers to their elections. The organization's Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) carries out the observation missions.

"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. "It provides voters, election administrators, contestants and the wider public with an independent and objective assessment of the electoral process."

A State Department spokesperson defended the decision, saying the OSCE "should focus its limited resources on elections where it can have the greatest impact."

Human Rights Watch said the refusal could make outside scrutiny of the midterms more difficult. "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 a far larger monitoring operation of its own. It has announced plans to send up to 1,000 monitors to polling places across the country — a record number — to enforce federal election laws. That enforcement role differs from OSCE observation, which assesses the process against the commitments participating states have made to one another.

OSCE observers closely watched Trump's first midterm election in 2018 and returned to observe the 2024 election, in which Trump was once again returned to the White House.

The move follows a national survey conducted last month by the University of California, San Diego, which found that fewer than half of Americans expect the midterm elections to be "free and fair." In that survey, 49 percent of respondents said they expected a free and fair electoral process, 23 percent said they did not expect one, and 28 percent said they did not know what to expect.

The pollsters' 2024 survey shows how far Americans' faith in the electoral system has declined during Trump's tenure. Before he took office, 77 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of independents expressed confidence in the process.