Across Michigan, volunteers are preparing to watch polling stations and counting centres. They’ve been recruited and trained by the Ford-Carter Election Observation Network, a partnership between the Carter Center and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, to monitor each stage of the state’s election process and check whether election laws and procedures are applied consistently. Having observed over 100 elections around the world, mostly in fragile or fledgling democracies, the Carter Center first observed a US election in 2020, when it focused on Georgia’s presidential recount. It then monitored other elections in Georgia in 2022 and 2024. Now it’s taking that work beyond its home state.

As domestic observation expands, international observers have been shut out. On 23 September, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which has observed every US federal election since 2002, announced it hadn’t received an invitation. The government’s decision places the USA alongside Belarus and Russia, which also refused to admit OSCE observers in their latest national elections.

Instead, the government is sending its own observers. In its largest operation ever, the Justice Department is deploying around 1,000 monitors in all 50 states. Federal monitors normally visit areas with histories of discrimination to safeguard voting access, but this time, on stated ‘election security’ grounds, they’ll mostly target Democratic strongholds and seek to get inside polling places. Following legal challenges by civil rights groups concerned that voters would be put at risk, the department had to file a declaration that it wouldn’t deploy federal law enforcement and immigration agents as monitors. Some states plan to keep the department’s monitors at a distance from polling stations.

That the USA is closing itself off from foreign scrutiny while domestic bodies are using election-monitoring tools designed for fragile or backsliding democracies says much about the state of US democracy. Under Donald Trump’s second administration, the country is on its way to becoming a competitive authoritarian regime, where elections take place and the opposition can still win, but the incumbent abuses state power to tilt the playing field.

To weaken democratic checks, Trump has sought to silence those who scrutinise and challenge power, which has put civic freedoms in the firing line. In March 2025, the CIVICUS Monitor placed the USA on its Watchlist, which flags countries experiencing rapid declines in civic freedoms. In December 2025, the USA’s civic space rating was downgraded to obstructed, indicating serious restrictions, including harassment of civil society, repression of protests and pressure on the media. While the midterms offer a chance to reverse course, institutional manipulation makes it an uphill struggle.

Redistricting and racial gerrymandering

Congressional districts are typically redrawn to reflect population changes once a decade following the census. But in 2025, facing poor poll showings, Trump pressured Republican-led states to redraw their maps ahead of schedule, manipulating boundaries to win more seats. In August, Texas added five Republican-leaning seats. Gerrymandering has a long history in US politics, but this was the first coordinated national campaign to manufacture a congressional majority ahead of expected losses.

Democrats’ counter-efforts saw mixed results. California voters passed a map adding five Democratic-leaning seats, but in Virginia, the state Supreme Court blocked a voter-approved redistricting amendment. Overall, nine states – Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Utah – are voting under new maps. Only in California and Utah do changes favour Democrats. The new maps could hand Republicans up to 15 additional seats compared with six for Democrats, meaning that Republicans could lose a significant share of the vote without it costing them a corresponding number of seats.

Much of the redistricting blurred the line between partisan and racial gerrymandering. Since 2019, federal courts have refused to hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering, but drawing districts to dilute the votes of racial minorities remains unconstitutional. In practice, the two are hard to separate, particularly in the south, where Black voters overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. Maps drawn to eliminate Democratic seats often do so by breaking up districts with substantial numbers of voters of colour.

The conservative-dominated Supreme Court has made racial gerrymandering easier to carry out and harder to challenge. In November 2025, a federal court blocked Texas’s new map after finding it was likely a racial gerrymander, but the Supreme Court reversed the ruling, accepting the state’s argument that its motive was partisan. This cleared the way for the map to be used in the midterms. On 29 April, the Supreme Court went further, striking down a Louisiana map that created a second majority-Black district to comply with Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the main legal tool voters of colour have to contest discriminatory maps. Before, they could win a case by showing that a map weakened their votes, whatever lawmakers intended. Now they must show a map was drawn with the aim of discriminating, which is much harder to prove.

The day after the ruling, Louisiana’s governor postponed the state’s congressional primaries so the legislature could redraw the districts. The new map, which he signed into law a month later, eliminated a majority-Black district and is expected to give Republicans an extra seat. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, historically charged with enforcing voting rights, has pledged to review districts drawn to comply with Section 2 in every state, and its head has predicted that districts will be redrawn across almost all southern states in the coming years. Southern Black voters, whose representation was won through decades of struggle, stand to lose most.

Citizenship checks and voter purges

On the basis of the false claim that large numbers of non-citizens vote, the Justice Department has demanded complete voter registration lists from 49 states and the District of Columbia, including birthdates, partial Social Security numbers and driver’s licence numbers. In doing so, it has invoked the Civil Rights Act, which requires election officials to preserve voting records and allows the attorney general to inspect them. Passed in 1960 so the department could investigate discrimination against southern Black voters, the Act is now being invoked to obtain data that could be used to remove voters from the rolls.

Several states complied and handed over their files, and the Justice Department sued the 31 jurisdictions that refused. Oklahoma agreed to hand over its data in exchange for the lawsuit being dropped. All 26 judges who had ruled by mid-October threw out the lawsuits, and the only appeals court to decide so far upheld the dismissal of the Michigan case.

In March, the Justice Department gave the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) access to the voter rolls it had collected. In July, Trump claimed that a DHS review had found around 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in four states, including as many as 15,903 in Nevada. The figure came from matching state voter files against federal databases, a method DHS staff warned would vastly overstate the numbers. A month later, DHS officials admitted they’d confirmed only 185 cases in Nevada, and when the state checked those names, it found every one was a citizen.

On 9 October, in a lawsuit brought by the civil society organisation Common Cause, a federal judge in Washington, DC, struck down the Justice Department’s programme of collecting voter rolls and checking them against federal databases. The judge concluded that no law authorised this, that it violated federal privacy law and that the department had ignored the risk of eligible voters being removed from the rolls. On 15 October, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the League of Women Voters sued DHS, alleging it has secretly amassed voter files from at least 47 states, including some handed over by the Justice Department, and combined them with commercial data to hunt for supposed ‘illegal voters’.

DHS has also pushed states to check voters’ citizenship through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, a database built to verify immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits. Since 2025, DHS has overhauled the system and fed it confidential data from across the federal government, so states can now run bulk checks on their voter rolls. DHS’s internal assessments warned in mid-2025 that inaccurate data could produce false results, but over half of states are using it regardless.

In early 2026, a ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation found that the system had made numerous mistakes, particularly affecting citizens born abroad, whose Social Security records are often not updated when they naturalise. DHS has had to correct the results it gave to at least five states. Even counting the errors, the checks haven’t borne out claims of widespread non-citizen voting. In seven states with around 35 million registered voters, they flagged roughly 4,200 people, around 0.01 per cent of the electorate. In Missouri, hundreds were wrongly flagged and temporarily barred from voting, and in Texas the system wrongly flagged at least 87 voters across 29 counties. Some citizens whose registrations were cancelled were unable to vote in the March 2026 primary.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center and the League of Women Voters challenged the overhaul in court, and in June a federal judge ruled that it broke federal law. In September, however, the Supreme Court paused the ruling, allowing the system to keep running.

Other measures target voter registration. Since 2024, eight states have passed laws requiring people to show documents such as birth certificates or passports to register to vote. Trump and his allies in Congress want to extend the requirement to the whole country. In February, the House passed the SAVE America Act, which would impose the registration requirement nationwide and mandate photo IDs to cast a ballot, but the bill has stalled in the Senate. Over 20 million voting-age citizens lack ready access to such documents. Those most affected would be low-income people, young people and married women whose names no longer match their birth certificates.

The government has also sought to put DHS in charge of deciding who can vote by mail. Executive Order 14399, signed on 31 March, directs DHS to compile lists of eligible citizens for states and instructs the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to voters on approved lists. In August, the Supreme Court lifted one injunction against the order, ruling the challenge premature, but in mid-September it refused to let the Postal Service rules take effect for this election.

On 15 October, the Justice Department sued to stop California counting over 20,000 postal ballots from registered voters it suspects of being non-citizens, based on a list compiled by DHS. A federal judge refused on 28 October, finding the government’s method not credible and warning that its request would disrupt an election already under way. An appeals court rejected the department’s renewed bid two days later.

Pressure on election systems and staff

US elections are run by states and counties. This decentralised system, which in 2020 withstood Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat, is now under pressure.

In January, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents executed a search warrant at the election hub of Fulton County, Georgia, seizing hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots. The county, which includes most of Atlanta and votes heavily Democratic, has been at the centre of false fraud claims since 2020, even though its ballots were counted three times, with the results confirmed each time. The raid was a clear attempt to sow doubt about election integrity. Days later, Trump urged Republicans to ‘nationalize’ voting, arguing that states run elections as agents of the federal government. But the US Constitution says otherwise. It gives states the power to run elections and allows Congress to set rules for federal elections, while it gives no role to the president.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump has laid the groundwork for disputing results. On 23 October, the Justice Department sued Alaska to stop certification of its Senate race if the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, loses by fewer votes than those received by a little-known namesake on the ballot. Trump said he ordered the lawsuit himself. Three days later, he offered a US$1 million reward for information leading to convictions for voter fraud in past elections or the midterms.

While asserting control, the federal government has withdrawn protection. Since 2018, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has helped election officials defend their systems against cyberattacks and foreign interference. The administration has cut almost 1,000 of its staff, around a third of the workforce, and ended funding for the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, through which election offices shared threat information. Several states reported that CISA services they relied on were not available ahead of the midterms, and the agency published its election security plan just 40 days before the vote. The administration’s 2027 budget proposal would eliminate CISA’s election security programme, even though the head of US Cyber Command has warned that foreign adversaries are likely to try to interfere.

The election workforce is also being worn down. Turnover among local election officials reached 41 per cent in 2024, the highest in at least 25 years, driven partly by burnout, harassment and threats that intensified with the false claims that followed the 2020 election. Experience is draining away. The share of chief local election officials with six or more years in the job fell from 60 per cent in 2006 to 47 per cent in 2024. In a recent survey by the Brennan Center for Justice, 32 per cent of local election officials reported abuse, harassment or threats. Half said they were worried about political leaders interfering in how elections are run and three-quarters said their state or local government hadn’t replaced lost federal funding.

Voter targeting

In February, far-right former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents would ‘surround the polls’ in November, and the White House press secretary said she couldn’t guarantee that ICE agents wouldn’t be near polling locations. Weeks later, a senior DHS official told state election officials there’d be no ICE presence at polling places. But at his confirmation hearing in March, DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin said agents could be sent in response to a ‘specific threat’.

In June, during New York’s primary, two ICE officers confronted a poll worker at her polling site in Syracuse and handed her a warning over social media posts criticising ICE. In September, the FBI director declined to commit to keeping agents away from polling places. That month, civil rights organisations, the city of Denver and the Democratic Party filed lawsuits to keep armed federal agents away from voting sites. They cited evidence that fear is already depressing participation. In Minnesota, for instance, an organisation working with African immigrant communities reported only one new voter registered this year, compared with hundreds in previous years.

Intimidation has reached voters’ doorsteps. Under what DHS calls its ‘Unlawful Voter Initiative’, armed agents went door to door in several states to question people suspected of voting or registering while ineligible, including naturalised citizens. Their target lists were built from voter rolls and commercial data, some generated by unidentified AI tools. DHS stepped up the operation just as early voting began. On 21 October, a federal judge ruled that this probably amounted to voter intimidation in violation of the Voting Rights Act and barred agents from questioning people likely to be citizens until the polls close. The case had been brought by two nurses’ unions, the Voto Latino Foundation, the city and county of San Francisco and Santa Clara County. On 30 October, an appeals court refused to suspend the judge’s ban while the government appeals, pointing to the questionable timing of the operation. This left the ban in force through to election day.

Civil society holding the line

Civil society is resisting. Voting rights organisations have taken the Justice Department’s data demands, the overhaul of the citizenship database, the executive order on postal voting and the threat of armed agents at the polls to court. They’ve won most of these battles, including rulings to keep the Postal Service rules on hold and halt door-to-door visits until polls close.

Civil society groups are preparing voters to resist intimidation. The Vote Safe initiative is placing trusted community figures, such as faith leaders and teachers, at polling places in Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio to reassure voters and document intimidation. The American Civil Liberties Union has launched its largest-ever election protection effort. Non-partisan observation networks are placing trained people at polling stations. In Texas, Common Cause has trained over 400 volunteers. Local election administrators are preparing too. In Minnesota’s Hennepin County, for instance, they have trained staff on how to respond if federal agents appear at voting sites.

But this protective work is under pressure. In June, FBI agents searched the Cleveland office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a grassroots group that runs voter registration drives, seizing computers and questioning staff without providing any reason.

Funders and financial institutions have distanced themselves from targeted groups. In 2025, as the administration threatened philanthropists with Democratic ties, the Gates Foundation halted grants to non-profit funds administered by Arabella Advisors, a consultancy linked to Democratic causes. After the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center in April, the donor-advised funds run by Charles Schwab, Fidelity and Vanguard stopped processing donations to it, cutting off one of its main funding channels.

Legal support has thinned too. Large law firms represented plaintiffs in just 15 per cent of cases challenging Trump’s executive orders between January and mid-September 2025, down from around 75 per cent in the same period of his first term. Most of the litigation was left to civil society organisations and small firms.

Civil society is keeping up its work despite this pressure, and that doesn’t end when the polls close. Whether results that go against the Trump administration will be accepted is an open question. If they’re challenged, the records kept by thousands of volunteer observers may prove vital to ensuring voters’ choices are respected.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org.