Senate Democrats plan to announce on Thursday that they will create a program to train congressional staff to serve as election observers, warning that President Trump may attempt to interfere with the results of the midterm elections.
Their initiative, which resembles a long-running program in the House of Representatives, aims to recruit Senate staff to serve as independent observers who can be sent to polling places on behalf of Congress to monitor voting procedures and ballot counting in states with Senate races.
Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Alex Padilla of California, the top Democrat on the Senate committee overseeing elections, said in an interview that the program was meant to counteract Mr. Trump’s efforts to diminish confidence in U.S. elections and any attempt he might make to manipulate the outcomes.
“We need on-the-ground observers, and we need them in a large numbers of places, so we can make sure the elections are fair,” Mr. Schumer said.
Though Senate Democrats will focus only on training their staff, Mr. Padilla said that he expected Republicans would follow suit. Under the existing House program, Republicans and Democrats can train congressional staff as election observers, but it is up to members of each party where to send them.
The Senate Democrats’ program, announced with just more than four months until the midterm elections, is part of a broader effort by Mr. Schumer and his team to prepare for what they view as the threat of possible interference by the Trump administration in the balloting.
Their announcement came the day after Mr. Trump upended Congress by threatening to block Republican priorities unless Senate Republicans muscled through new legislation imposing voting restrictions, which they do not have the votes to pass.
The bill, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and substantially curtail voting by mail, is the latest front in Mr. Trump’s yearslong effort to sow doubt about the integrity of U.S. elections by making unsubstantiated and disproved claims of widespread voter fraud.
That campaign came to a violent climax in 2021, after a mob of pro-Trump supporters spurred by his baseless story of a stolen election stormed the Capitol in a bid to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss.
Mr. Padilla said that Senate Democrats decided to implement their version of the House’s election observer program after seeing an accumulation of “real threats — not hypothetical, but real threats” to the upcoming elections.
Since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term, his administration has gutted election security infrastructure, and the Justice Department has been compiling a massive database of national voter information that voting rights experts fear could be used to discredit election results.
The president also recently installed a loyalist as the acting director of national intelligence and directed him to work on election security matters, raising Democrats’ concerns.
Mr. Trump signed a legally questionable executive order aimed restricting some mail-in ballots, one that the Postal Service has cited as it proposed not delivering mail-in ballots in states that decline to hand over voter information to the federal government. The president has also said that he regretted not sending the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 presidential election.
Mr. Schumer said that Mr. Trump’s actions and remarks had significantly eroded Americans’ faith in elections, regardless of their party.
He also acknowledged that Democrats’ hopes of winning the Senate majority rely on a small number of races that polling suggests could be close. Democrats would need to flip at least four Republican seats while fending off challengers in other key battlegrounds.
“Small mishaps in some of these states could determine who carries or who keeps the Senate if elections are close,” Mr. Schumer said.
Though election certification, recounts and audits are usually conducted at the state level, the Constitution gives Congress the final say over the “elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” Lawmakers have drawn on this authority to allow them to dispatch election observers to any state, and they passed a law in 2024 that required states to allow congressional election observers full access to monitor federal election procedures.
Though they report back to their own parties, the observers sent by Congress are intended to serve as nonpartisan witnesses who can take notes on proceedings and brief the relevant House and Senate committees in the case of a contested election.
They operate separately from observers sent by campaigns, and they are not allowed to engage in partisan political activity or to advocate on behalf of candidates while they are monitoring election procedures.
