In Other News · United States · Politics

Source: Axios

The 2026 midterms are shaping up to be the most intensely observed, recorded, dissected and challenged election in American history.Why it matters: A small army of partisan and nonpartisan observers will show up. So will a surge of Justice Department monitors, organizers looking for signs of ICE and citizen journalists broadcasting their search for illegal voting in real time.Between the lines: More nonpartisan observation can bolster confidence in elections, studies show. But officials worry that activists expecting to find wrongdoing could misread routine events.Election officials have been raising concerns that "vigilante citizen journalists" could interfere with the election, said Andrew Walchuck of Common Cause, a nonprofit organization that's also recruiting nonpartisan election observers."I worry that people are going to go in and claim they're seeing things that they aren't," said Andrew Garber of the Brennan Center."Just minor, innocuous things that are going to happen as millions and millions of ballots get cast and counted, then it gets spun into something nefarious or untrue," Garber said.The intrigue: After the 2020 election, claims from observers and activist sleuths helped fuel challenges to the results.It was then channeled into numerous lawsuits from the Trump campaign. The cases were almost all dismissed or denied...