Anti-voting activists co-ordinating with White House on blatantly illegal draft emergency order to take control of elections
A draft emergency executive order to declare a national emergency to allow President Donald Trump to take unprecedented control over voting is being circulated by anti-voting activists who said they are in coordination with the White House.
Voting rights experts, democracy advocates, and at least one state election chief said Trump doesn’t have the authority to claim such powers — and any attempt would be blatantly unconstitutional.
The draft order — which is said to be based on a conspiracy theory that China interfered with the 2020 election — would allow Trump to unilaterally ban mail-in ballots and voting machines on the basis that they are susceptible to foreign interference.
The order comes from MAGA activists who have been coordinating with the White House. One of the advocates for the order is Peter Ticktin, the attorney for Tina Peters, the former GOP Colorado county clerk who is currently serving a nine-year state prison sentence for her role in a 2021 voting system breach, in an attempt to find voter fraud based on election conspiracies.
The Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives states — not the president — sole authority over elections.
But in an email to Democracy Docket, Ticktin said that Trump “may invoke emergency powers in response to an election emergency involving foreign interference, provided certain statutory and procedural requirements are met.”
Ticktin said those requirements derive from the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEA).
“These powers are subject to procedural safeguards and judicial review to ensure compliance with constitutional and statutory limits,” Ticktin added.
Trump could have been referencing the legal argument laid out in the draft emergency order in a social media post earlier this month, where he threatened to bypass Congress to implement voter ID requirements and to ban mail-in voting.
“I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future,” Trump wrote.
He later posted that would “be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.”
“What a gift such a clearly unconstitutional executive order would be!,” David Becker, the executive director of Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorney, noted on social media. “Though divorced from legal and factual reality, it would enable the courts to invalidate this power grab well in advance of the election, and confirm the clear limits to [federal] interference in elections.”
“The Constitution is absolutely clear,” Michael McNulty, the policy director for the pro-democracy group Issue One, said in a statement. “The president does not have legal authority to unilaterally change election rules. Any attempt by the White House to do so would contradict the Constitution and would almost certainly be struck down by the courts.”
Ned Foley, an election law scholar, noted that “it would take new federal legislation to give the president or any part of the federal executive branch that kind of authority over the conduct of congressional elections.”
In a statement, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold vowed to “fight back” if Trump were to attempt to seize control of voting with any such executive order.
“Donald Trump continues to be one of the greatest threats to American elections,” Griswold said. “Regardless of whether this suggested executive order ultimately materializes, every American — regardless of party or ideology — should be extremely concerned by Trump’s continued use of lies and conspiracy to justify attempts to seize the reins of election administration and hold on to power. That is not democracy, it is attempted authoritarianism.”
Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former DOJ voting official, told Democracy Docket the draft order is not just illegal, but “there is literally no authority here that any local official would have to listen to.”
“It doesn’t require anybody to file anything in court to stop the impact,” Levitt added. “It just requires… not listening. Which is both easier and quicker.”
Max Flugrath, a spokesman for the pro-voting group Fair Fight Action, told Democracy Docket that Trump “cannot seize control of state-run elections by declaring an ’emergency.’”
“There’s no statute that permits it, and courts have already rejected similar election overreach – including Trump’s March 2025 order,” Flugrath said. “Reviving debunked conspiracy theories to force changes before a major election is what politicians do when they believe they’re going to lose.”
This isn’t the first time pro-Trump, anti-voting activists have implied that Trump would execute emergency powers to take control of voting ahead of the midterm elections. In September, the prominent conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell — who played a key role in Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election — said on a podcast appearance that she thinks “the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.”
“The president’s authority is limited in his role with regard to elections except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States — as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have,” Mitchell added.
The Washington Post reported that the draft order outlining how Trump could use emergency powers to seize voting because of a foreign threat has been circulating since at least July, according to the conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.
“The administration is reportedly planning to use false claims of foreign election interference by China in 2020 to justify the draft executive order,” McNulty added. “There is no credible evidence of Chinese government interference in the 2020 elections, and intelligence agencies issued past reports that verified that.”
