An Election Is Not a Family Heirloom

By Vahid Razavi — Author of The Age of Nepotism, No Ethics in Big Tech, and Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof; Founder of EthicsInTech.com and NoEthicsInBigTech.com; Producer of the Forever Peace Now documentary.

I was born in Iran. I know what it looks like when a state decides that the counting of votes is a formality to be managed rather than a fact to be discovered. I have spent thirty years inside the American technology industry and the better part of a decade documenting its crimes, and I have learned that the machinery of control is never announced. It is installed quietly, in advance, by people who are careful to keep every step technically legal.

Eighteen years ago I wrote a book called The Age of Nepotism, about how favoritism toward family and friends corrodes business, politics and society. I never imagined the age would announce itself this brazenly, or that I would be writing this sentence: the United States has invited international observers to watch every general and midterm election since 2002, and as of this writing there is no public record that anyone has sent the invitation for November 3, 2026.

Let me say plainly what I am asking for. Democrats, independents, and every Republican who still believes a vote is a vote should be demanding — publicly, this week, by name — that the State Department issue an invitation to the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. Not in October. Now.

Here is why that ask is not paranoid. It is overdue.

The Invitation Nobody Sent

Every two years something unglamorous happens. Washington sends a letter to an office in Warsaw. Warsaw sends a small advance team — a Needs Assessment Mission — which spends a week meeting secretaries of state, civil society groups and election administrators, writes an assessment, and recommends what kind of observation mission to deploy.

It has happened before every general and midterm election since 2002, under four presidents of both parties. In 2024, ODIHR deployed fifteen experts and sixty-four long-term observers from twenty-seven countries. It was the eleventh such mission to the United States.

As of late July 2026, ODIHR’s public calendar listed the November 3 midterms as upcoming with no needs assessment and no recorded activity of any kind. The advance work should have been finished months ago.

I am not going to tell you this proves the invitation was deliberately withheld. It may be a scheduling failure. But I have watched this exact pattern before, in other countries, and so have you. Russia blocked ODIHR from its 2021 Duma elections and sent no invitation in 2024. Belarus has not invited them since 2020. Georgia issued its invitation less than a month before its 2025 local elections — too late, ODIHR said, to observe anything credibly.

None of those governments held a press conference to renounce their commitments. They simply let the invitation become late, or conditional, or absent. That is how this is done. It is done by omission, and the omission is always deniable.

What Is Being Built While Nobody Watches

1. A seventeen-page draft, and a president who will not say no

On August 23, 2026, George Chidi reported in The Guardian — the piece that prompted me to write this, also carried here — that a summer’s worth of White House documents, disputed noncitizen-voting analyses and declassified intelligence memos have convinced voting experts that this administration is preparing to declare a national emergency over the midterms.

Aria Branch of the Elias Law Group, who led the litigation that blocked the president’s earlier election orders, told Chidi the administration is “trying to lay the groundwork to declare some sort of emergency to nationalize elections.”

This is not a lawyer’s speculation. The Washington Post‘s Isaac Arnsdorf reported that pro-Trump activists who say they are coordinating with the White House are circulating a seventeen-page draft executive order that invokes claimed Chinese interference in 2020 as the legal basis for an emergency declaration unlocking extraordinary presidential power over voting.

Seventeen pages. Already drafted. And on a podcast with Dan Bongino, the president said the quiet part into a microphone: “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Asked directly by a right-wing broadcaster whether he would declare a national security emergency over elections, he declined to rule it out.

Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives the times, places and manner of congressional elections to the state legislatures, with Congress — not the president — empowered to override. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said it as clearly as it can be said when she blocked an earlier order: the Constitution does not permit unilateral presidential changes to federal election procedure. That is the law. Whether the law holds is a separate question, and it is the question this November will answer.

2. The Postal Service has finished building the machine

Late on Friday night, August 21, the United States Postal Service published a ninety-five-page final rule implementing the president’s March executive order on mail voting. Under it, states must submit their mail-ballot voter lists to a new federal portal, and USPS will not deliver ballots in states that refuse.

Now let me be precise, because I deal in documented facts and my critics are waiting for me not to. USPS did not defy a court. The rule states that the agency will not implement it for the 2026 election unless and until the government obtains relief from two standing injunctions.

Understand what that means, because the precision makes it worse, not better. They built the entire apparatus. They finalized it. They gave it an effective date of August 21. They wrote it so it can be switched on the instant the Supreme Court lifts the block — and the administration has asked the Court to do exactly that on an expedited basis. Seventy-two days before an election, the gun is loaded, chambered, and pointed. They are waiting on nine people to say go.

And read what the rule admits it is for. As Democracy Docket documented, the federal database exists to hand law enforcement a list of every individual a state intended to mail a ballot to, with the associated barcode data. A national registry of mail voters, built by the post office, delivered to federal police.

Judge Indira Talwani, who blocked the order in June and again on August 11, wrote that no law enacted by Congress delegates authority over mail-in voting to USPS. Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi warned back in April that the order would place the Postal Service in an unprecedented gatekeeping role over who receives a ballot.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. As the Center for American Progress has detailed, USPS is simultaneously consolidating mail processing facilities, and new rules mean items may not be postmarked the day they are dropped off. In a system where the postmark is now the proof a voter acted in time, that is not an administrative detail. That is the mechanism.

3. The maps were redrawn after voting had already started

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, holding 6–3 in an opinion by Justice Alito that Louisiana’s map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Kagan wrote in dissent that the decision renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”

What followed was the most aggressive mid-decade map war in modern American history. Louisiana passed a new map dismantling one of its two majority-Black districts. Tennessee drew and signed a new map within nine days of the ruling. Georgia’s governor called a special session.

Sixty-one years after Selma, a court has told the states that the districts drawn to give Black Americans representation were themselves the constitutional violation. I want that sentence to sit where it is.

And I will not pretend only one party plays this game. Virginia Democrats pushed a constitutional amendment bypassing the bipartisan commission their own voters approved in 2020, potentially worth four seats. I include that deliberately. If your objection to rigged maps evaporates when your side draws them, you do not have a principle. You have a preference. Observers document everyone, which is precisely why both parties should welcome them and precisely why neither has asked.

4. Armed agents, and a promise nobody will put in writing

In February, a Department of Homeland Security official told secretaries of state on a conference call that immigration agents would not be stationed at polling locations. Republican and Democratic secretaries confirmed it.

Then the incoming DHS Secretary declined to rule it out at his confirmation hearing, carving out an exception for a “specific threat.” Steve Bannon told his audience: “You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November.” The White House press secretary, asked directly, would not rule it out either. And ICE told a federal court it may hold thousands of documents responsive to congressional demands about polling-place plans, then — as of mid-July — produced not a single page.

More than half a dozen states are now writing laws to keep federal agents away from election sites. That tells you exactly what February’s verbal assurance is worth to the people who actually run elections. Sending armed federal officers to intimidate voters is already illegal under federal law. Illegality has not been much of an obstacle lately.

I have spent years documenting what this deportation apparatus does to human beings — the raids, the family separations, the surveillance contracts that Silicon Valley wrote and sold without a moment’s hesitation. The same companies that built the targeting systems built the databases. Now the question is whether that apparatus gets pointed at a polling place, and the answer from the people closest to the president is a shrug.

The Age of Nepotism, Fully Arrived

This is where my two beats become one beat, and where I have to name the thing this newsletter was built to name.

Larry Ellison — a longtime Trump ally who raised millions for his campaign — financed his son David’s acquisition of Paramount, which owns CBS. The FCC cleared that deal weeks after Paramount agreed to pay Donald Trump sixteen million dollars to settle his lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview, and after Skydance committed to permanently shutting down its diversity programs and installing an ombudsman to review complaints of bias at CBS. In January, an Oracle-led consortium took eighty percent of TikTok’s U.S. operations. In February, after Netflix withdrew, the family moved to take Warner Bros. Discovery — CNN, HBO, Discovery.

One family. A father’s fortune, a son’s name on the door, and a meaningful share of what a hundred million Americans will see about this election.

And understand who this man is. At Oracle’s 2024 financial analyst meeting, Ellison described a future of AI reviewing footage from cameras placed everywhere, in which “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording.”

That is not a business plan. That is a confession. The man who dreams openly of total surveillance is buying the newsrooms that would be expected to report on total surveillance. This is the same industry I have spent two books documenting: the industry that sold facial recognition to police departments, that built Project Nimbus, that ran targeting systems over Gaza, that fired the workers who objected and called it a personnel matter. Inhumane business practices are not a bug in this sector. They are the operating model, and now that model has bought the transmission lines of American democracy.

Then there is the money itself. On June 30, in NRSC v. FEC, the Supreme Court struck down limits on coordinated party spending entirely, overruling a twenty-five-year-old precedent. Elon Musk has authorized America PAC to spend up to $120 million across at least eight states. MAGA Inc. holds roughly $400 million. Republican outside groups lead Democratic counterparts by more than $300 million.

And AIPAC’s political operation has now passed $104.3 million this cycle — more than it spent in all of 2024 — including a record $30.6 million in a single Michigan Senate primary. Thirty million of the hundred million its super PAC raised came from AIPAC itself, a social welfare nonprofit whose donors cannot be traced. Politico found that more than forty percent of what it has spent across primaries in both parties was routed through pop-up and pass-through committees — nine different shells designed for one purpose: so that a voter in Detroit could not learn who was talking to her until after she had already voted.

That is the objection, and it holds regardless of what you think about Gaza. Foreign policy should be argued in the open, on the merits, by people willing to sign their names. Crypto and AI industry super PACs have been running the identical play in the identical races. Concealment is the product. Concealment is what I object to.

What Monitors Do, and What They Cannot Do

Let me undercut my own argument, because the honest version is the persuasive one.

International observers have no enforcement power. They cannot void a rule, restore a ballot, or overturn a result. Their code of conduct forbids them from instructing, assisting or interfering. Some states — Tennessee among them — bar them from polling places outright. In 2012, the Texas attorney general threatened to prosecute OSCE observers who came within a hundred feet of a polling site.

So what is the point?

The record. A neutral, credentialed, internationally recognized account written by people with no American career to protect and no stake in who wins. If this election is clean, that record is the strongest possible answer to whoever claims otherwise — and someone will claim otherwise, from the highest office in the land, with a seventeen-page draft already written. If it is not clean, the record exists, contemporaneously, in the hands of people no one can accuse of partisanship.

I have spent my career learning one lesson above all others: the documentation is the fight. Everything I do at ParentsPlea.com, everything in Forever Peace Now, everything in No Ethics in Big Tech proceeds from the conviction that the record we make now is the only thing that survives the people who would rather it did not exist. An observation mission is that principle applied to an election.

A referee’s notebook is worth having before the game, not after.

The Objections, Stated Fairly

Sovereignty. Elections belong to the states under Article I, Section 4, and there is something odd about foreign nationals inspecting them. Fair — except this is a reciprocal commitment the United States signed in Copenhagen in 1990 and has honored for a quarter century, and we are the loudest voice on earth demanding other countries honor it.

It is theater. A limited mission of a few dozen observers cannot meaningfully cover three thousand counties. True. It is a legal-framework review and a spot check, not an audit. It has never claimed otherwise.

It hands ammunition to election deniers. Asking for monitors implies our elections are suspect, which is the exact narrative the other side is pushing. This is the strongest objection. It does not survive the fact that we have done this eleven times — including 2018 and 2022 — and nobody’s legitimacy collapsed.

It changes nothing. Correct. It changes the evidentiary record. That is all it does. That is enough.

What To Do This Week

Three things. None require you to change your vote.

One. Ask your senator and your representative, publicly and by name, whether the ODIHR invitation has been issued. It is a one-sentence question with no defensible evasion. Post the question. Post the non-answer.

Two. Ask your secretary of state to admit international and nonpartisan observers directly, because access is governed at the state level no matter what Washington does or fails to do.

Three. Volunteer with the domestic nonpartisan observer organizations now, in August, not on November 2. They will be in vastly more precincts than any international mission and they are short of people.

The invitation costs nothing. It requires no legislation, no appropriation, no permission. A letter. An envelope. Warsaw.

Sending it tells you something. Refusing to send it tells you a great deal more.

We have asked the world to let us watch them vote for twenty-four years. If we cannot bear to be watched ourselves, we should stop pretending we do not already know why.

Vahid Razavi is the author of The Age of Nepotism, No Ethics in Big Tech and Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof, and director of the documentary Forever Peace Now. His work is self-funded — no corporate sponsors, no government grants, no advertising. Learn more at AgeOfNepotism.com, NoEthicsInBigTech.com, ForeverPeaceNow.com, ParentsPlea.com and MyAWSStory.com.

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