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Trump Warns About Election Interference but Skips Outside Watchers

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If Republicans and Trump are so worried about election interference, why did they decide not to invite the outside election watchers this year?

On July 17th, the White House warned that foreign governments could hack or tamper with US election systems. It said those systems had serious weak spots.

You’d think Trump’s team would want more people watching for all of these nefarious election cheaters, right?

On Sept. 23rd, a group called the OSCE said it hadn’t been invited to watch the 2026 midterms. The group sends outside teams to watch elections and report what they see. As of that date, this was the first US federal election since 2002 for which it hadn’t received an invitation.

SINCE 2002!

Its teams have watched 12 federal elections here, including six midterms. This was a normal part of how we let the rest of the world check our work.

These people don’t run our elections. They can’t tell poll workers what to do or change the vote count. Their job is to watch, ask questions, and report what they find.

Voters get an account from people who don’t have a candidate to sell us. That’s useful when the people in the race each want us to trust their version.

Now - election watchers can’t stop a hacker. They don’t replace the people who protect voting systems. But Trump can take those threats seriously and still let an outside team assess how the election was run.

He doesn’t have to pick one.

The same group watched the election Trump won in 2024. Its report said the campaign was competitive and that voting was run well at the places its teams visited.

It also found problems.

International election watchers were barred by law in 17 states. They faced other blocks in other places.

The old setup already had holes. An invite from the federal government didn’t get these teams into every polling place.

BUT Trump’s admin decided to just skip the entire thing this year.

The US was certainly a fan of these poll watchers when Russia was the one refusing to send an invite. We had lots to say about that.

In Feb. 2024, the US mission to the OSCE criticized Russia for not inviting teams to watch its presidential election. It said the US valued fair, independent reviews of its own elections. Inviting watchers helped countries “model democratic behavior,” it said.

Biden was president then. Those were his team’s words. But it was the US telling another country why letting people check your elections mattered.

Trump’s team has handed other governments a pretty easy reply the next time we make that case.

On Sept. 28th, the US gave notice that it was leaving GRECO, according to AP. That’s a Council of Europe group that reviews countries’ rules against corruption. We’ve been a member since 2000, and our exit takes effect on Dec. 31, 2026.

GRECO checks the rules, recommends fixes, and comes back to see what changed. Members agree to have their own work reviewed.

Its 2023 US report called for stronger rules for presidents and VPs. It said they should leave outside jobs and deal with investments that could put their own profit ahead of their public duties. It also called for ways to hold them to the rules, including after they leave office.

Biden was president for that report, too. This is not a partisan body.

AP says the State Dept. thinks membership costs more than it’s worth for US security. It prefers sanctions, visa bans, and help for foreign corruption probes.

Those tools let Washington go after people abroad - they don’t tell us whether an American president’s business interests clash with the job we’re paying him to do.

Russia and Belarus are the group’s two former members. Russia’s membership ended in July 2023, and Belarus’s ended in May 2024, after they left anti-corruption treaties. What great company!

So, basically - Trump wants us to believe that every election is rigged if he doesn’t win - or his minions don’t - and now he’s getting rid of an objective body that would probably call bullshit on the claim.

Sources