TICKTIN peter
MERRI OK
SEE XO EMERGENCY DECL ~ 2026 FASCISM PENDING
BANNON CARAVAN
see corsi election bs}:
ED FUCKING MARTIN
TINA PETERS
OATHKEEPER PROUD BOYS JAN 6
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NOTE CARAVAN BS BEFORE EVRY ELECTION
MMA
Within hours of Republican midterm loss, right-wing media began fearmongering about a migrant caravan
Conservative pundits revived the narrative almost immediately, illustrating the centrality of xenophobia to their coverage
Written by John Knefel
Research contributions from Alex Kaplan
Published 11/06/26
Mere hours after Democrats notched massive wins in the midterms, right-wing media dusted off an old playbook and began fearmongering about a supposedly looming migrant “caravan” heading toward the southern border.
Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade mentioned it, as did former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and conservative lawyer and pundit Peter Ticktin. Right-wing media have spent years ominously warning about caravans or a so-called “invasion” at the southern border, often (but not exclusively) at the height of an election cycle.
It’s especially noteworthy that Bannon and Ticktin jumped on this new narrative so quickly, as both are key figures in the election denial movement. Bannon’s War Room podcast has been a central hub for pushing false claims about voter fraud and stolen elections, and Ticktin is a lawyer for former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, a hero to that movement. And although Fox News has eased back from overt election denial following a lawsuit concerning its 2020 coverage, the network’s history of demonizing immigrants is well documented.
On November 4, Ingraham told her primetime audience about “the least shocking development since the blue tsunami.”
“A new caravan forming in Honduras,” Ingraham continued. “They are marching right for the U.S. border as Democrats took control of Congress.”
The implication for her was obvious, which was that “while Republicans still have control of Congress for the rest of the year, they must use this so-called lame duck session to codify Trump's border agenda into law.”
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From the November 4, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
The following morning, her colleague Brian Kilmeade picked up the baton on Fox & Friends, albeit only in passing.
“There’s another caravan coming — plus Republicans searching for answers after their midterm losses,” Kilmeade said.
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From the November 5, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
Both Ingraham and Fox & Friends had seeded the threat of a supposed caravan in late September in anticipation of Republican losses, and Ingraham did again on October 21.
“Right on cue, a massive migrant caravan marching through Mexico toward the U.S. border,” she said, adding that “it’s almost as if they know, or they think, the Democrats are going to win Congress.”
Like the two Fox hosts, Bannon mentioned the caravan the day after midterms only briefly, without sourcing. His comments weren’t surprising because Bannon is one of the most consistently anti-immigrant voices in right-wing media. He has spent years championing indiscriminate mass deportations, in addition to his history of election denial. But the midterm results were such a massive repudiation of Trump and the losses were so large that even Bannon couldn’t plausibly allege mass voter fraud, so he returned to the familiar refuge of scapegoating immigrants.
“They've already got caravans coming up,” Bannon said on November 4. “They're all excited down in Central America that the gates are open again.”
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From the November 4, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
The same day, Ticktin appeared on the livestream of Wayne Allyn Root, a longtime sputtering satellite in Trump’s orbit, and — like Ticktin himself — a key figure in the election denial movement.
“Why is there a caravan going up through Mexico?” Ticktin asked. “Who told these people that they're going to be able to get into this impenetrable fortress of the United States where we have this wall that goes around it?”
“Somebody did,” he continued. “Somebody with enough convincing power or enough money or whatever it was to get everybody to get organized and start coming up, because that's what's coming next.”
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From the November 4, 2026, edition of War Zone LIVE! with Wayne Allyn Root, streamed on Rumble
The comments from Bannon and Ticktin help illustrate how xenophobia and election denial — two central pillars of the MAGA movement — are inextricably bound together by the same impulse, namely to define who is and who is not considered a citizen with equal rights. The racist “great replacement” theory, which, to use its own terms, states that globalist elites are importing “Third World immigrants” to replace white voters, is the most common rhetorical mechanism that links these two subjects.
Right-wing website The Daily Caller aggregated news of the supposed caravan, and conspiracy theory site The Gateway Pundit warned in the abstract that the midterm results were “a signal for border-busting caravans to start their engines,” citing analysis from Fox News’ Bill Melugin, a reporter with a history of producing anti-immigrant coverage. Alex Jones’ website hyped the manufactured threat as well.
Citation
From AlexJonesLive.com, posted November 4, 2026
It’s not unusual for right-wing media to propagandize the supposed danger of an approaching migrant “caravan.” But by pivoting to such fearmongering immediately after historic, era-defining losses for Republicans in the midterms, these figures and outlets reveal how desperate they are to change the subject away from Democratic victories and to avoid any hint of blame for President Donald Trump. Instead, they’ve returned to the well-worn conservative songbook of demonizing and scapegoating immigrants — it’s an old tune, and they all have the same sheet music at the ready.
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The election denial movement failed — but it will be back
11/05/26
Brian Kilmeade says JD Vance is “the person who did the most damage to the war effort” in Iran
11/05/26
Some right-wing media figures say midterm losses are a death knell for a JD Vance 2028 run
11/04/26
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mma
Election denial movement sets stage for chaos on Election Day and its aftermath
So-called election integrity activists are calling for Trump to declare martial law, mandate hand-counting of ballots, seize voting machines, and refuse to certify elections at a whim
Written by John Knefel & Sophie Lawton
Published 10/20/26 2:17 PM EDT
Updated 10/20/26 4:58 PM EDT
The election denial movement has spent months trying and largely failing to subvert the midterms, and now some of its major figures are articulating their plans to attempt to disrupt the vote on Election Day and sow chaos in the weeks and months that follow.
Their proposals include calling for President Donald Trump to declare martial law, sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the military to polling places, forcing officials to count ballots by hand, demanding the federal government seize voting machines, and working to stop the certification of some elections.
The main figures pushing at least one or more of the above measures include former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, her lawyer Peter Ticktin, and conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, among other election denial and right-wing media figures.
These developments follow months of activity from right-wing media operatives who have pushed for the implementation of various anti-voting rights measures, many of which have been thwarted, have stalled, or never came to fruition. A MAGA media effort to convince Trump to declare a national emergency seems to be dead in the water.
Even as many of these pre-Election Day efforts have faltered, new conspiracy theories continue to emerge. Mitchell, who aided Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has claimed without evidence that left-wing organizations are illegally harvesting ballots from nursing homes, for example.
But as the election draws near, some figures have set their sights on the day itself and what comes after.
Pushing for chaos on Election Day
Noncitizen voting is a vanishingly rare occurrence
Right-wing media figures in the election denial movement are pushing to make Election Day confusing and chaotic on the pretext of preventing noncitizen voting — a vanishingly rare occurrence.
Forcing hand-counts
Tina Peters, a hero to election deniers, and her lawyer Peter Ticktin, a personal friend of Trump’s, have been pressing Trump to attempt to force officials to hand-count ballots, sometimes instead of machines and sometimes in addition to them.
In July, Peters released a “100-Day Risk Mitigation Election Plan” that would require officials to “apply the ‘Bank-Teller Method’: independently hand-count every ballot for federal contests before certification and reconcile that count with the tabulator result.”
Then in August, Peters claimed the administration already had the “authority” to “issue immediate cybersecurity guidance and assistance to transition all counties to hand mark paper ballots,” and that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had the duty to interfere in how states use voting machines.
Peters has also allegedly met with Trump on at least two occasions since her release from prison on election-related charges — once on June 30 and again on October 5.
Ticktin, meanwhile, has taken a slightly different approach recently, acknowledging that eliminating machines at this point is not feasible. On September 29, Ticktin said, “We could still have an order that requires — not hand-counting and get rid of the machines, because there’s no time for that — but let the machines do the count, but before the count — but then let us commandeer and get the ballots. If we have the ballots, we can count them ourselves.” He added that “it would be done after the election, but before certification."
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From the September 29, 2026, edition of Alex Jones Live's The Alex Jones Show
Ed Martin is another proponent of this unnecessary and counterproductive measure. On Bannon’s War Room episode on October 6, Martin claimed that any election officials who want to “switch out your state and stop using the Chinese compromised machines, you can do it, and you can just ask [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne] Mullin for the money and he can help you pay for more people, pay for hand-marked paper ballots and counters and everything else.” He also noted that “Tina Peters met with Trump” recently.
Cleta Mitchell has long been on crusade to limit the use of voting machines, and, like Peters, has demanded that Lutnick interfere in state election processes based on an incorrect interpretation of an obscure federal regulation. Mitchell said that Lutnick should order “mandatory, pre-certification manual confirmation hand counts of ballots in 5% of the precincts and central count for each jurisdiction in the country.”
Stationing ICE and other federal officers or the military at polling places
Calls for ICE or other federal officers at polling places aren’t new — Steve Bannon has been making the demand since at least August 2025 and has continued to do so throughout the midterm election cycle — but they have become more widespread. As recently as August, Bannon said: “I think ICE agents belong at polling places."
Mike Davis, a frequent guest of Bannon’s, said on September 1: “I would have ICE agents and other federal law enforcement at every polling place across America. And that should only scare away noncitizens.”
YouTube streamer Tim Pool said in July that “at the bare minimum, we expect something like we will have federal law enforcement agency at polling locations in states that do not cooperate” with the Department of Homeland Security.
Jerome Corsi, former employee of Alex Jones, took an even more extreme line in calling for Trump to send the military to polling sites under the guise of a national emergency. “Donald Trump can take control of the elections,” Corsi said on September 12. “He can have the military or National Guard go in and make sure the elections are done legitimately.” Corsi claims to have been involved in drafting a proposed “national emergency” order.
Several other right-wing pundits have endorsed the idea of having ICE at polling places over the course of the year as well, including The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, Fox News’ Jesse Watters.
The right-wing media figures plotting to sow doubt and contest results after the midterms
Declaring martial law and involving the military in recounts
Ticktin is the most vocal election denial activist to suggest that Trump invoke martial law after the midterms.
On September 19, Ticktin said during an appearance on Real America’s Voice, “Either we’re going to fix this thing before this election or we’re probably going to see martial law after this election.”
Then during an appearance on The Alex Jones Show on September 29, Ticktin said that if the election is “stolen from us because of their machines,” then Trump will “have to declare martial law.”
“I didn’t say declare martial law for the elections,” he added, “I’m saying in the event that the elections are stolen, what other options are there?”
Video
Citation
From the September 29, 2026, edition of Alex Jones Live's The Alex Jones Show
A few other prominent figures in the election denial movement have also called for Trump to declare martial law. These voices include MAGA “prophet” Julie Green and Douglas Frank, one of Ticktin’s fellow travellers.
On September 15, Green claimed that an impending declaration of martial law would lead to the mass arrests of politicians, judges, and lawyers. “It’s not just an election. There has to be a political reset,” Green said, “During the martial law it will not just be politicians tried for treason. So will judges, AGs, lawyer, prosecutors, who are against this nation."
On August 22, Frank said of Trump, “I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he declares martial law and we have the National Guard come out and we have to redo the election.”
MAGA fantasies about involving the military after the election extend beyond these calls for martial law as well. Where Corsi wanted the military to take over election systems, others in the movement have called on the military to intervene in the counting or recounting of votes.
Seizing machines or ballots
Beyond suggesting the president declare martial law, Ticktin has concocted a plan for the government to seize ballots or election machines in order to “count them ourselves” and prevent supposed fraud. Ticktin predicted on Alex Jones’ show that Trump would “seize the machines” in order to protect himself from prosecution by the Democrats if they win the House and Senate.
QAnon influencer and election denier Juan O. Savin said in an interview streamed on Rumble that any election machines with foreign components could “be seized as evidence and investigated and canceled.” Savin pushed for Trump to delay the election, but argued, “If you need the public to turn their brains on and become engaged, don't pause it then. Let it run the distance and then go seize those machines” after the election is over.
Right-wing media figures have previously supported the seizing of election materials, such as when the FBI raided election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, and when Sheriff Chad Bianco seized 650,000 ballots in Riverside County, California. Real America's Voice host Wayne Allyn Root said of Bianco’s efforts, “I guarantee you he was going to find that all or most of them are filled with fraud and filled with illegal aliens,” and called the court’s order to return the ballots “a disgrace."
Trump himself has reportedly said that he “regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election,” according to The New York Times.
Pushing for Trump to delay the election
Juan O. Savin is not the only figure who has suggested Trump delay the elections in order to investigate voting machines or other election infrastructure. In an interview with David Nino Rodriguez on Rumble, former Overstock.com CEO turned election conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne called on Trump to “delay things."
Byrne's plan includes Trump putting former U.S. Agency for International Development employee Tim Meisburger in charge of elections countrywide and making it a one-day affair in which “you have to show an ID” and “there's no technology used.” He further suggested Trump “delays them and then puts this guy in charge of the election. And he could do a national security order, do something like that, and we could have an election like they run it in Burma.”
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Citation
From an October 15, 2026, stream by David Nino Rodriguez uploaded to Insights 21 channel on Rumble
Demanding Trump or other officials not certify elections
In an early October interview, Juan O. Savin claimed Trump has indicated “that we're going to fight hard to not allow them to certify the election after the election for reasons that we raise between now and Election Day,” citing voting machines with foreign-made parts as the “reason."
Video
Citation
From an October 6, 2026, stream on YouTube by Michael Jaco
Later in the interview Savin referenced Byrne's conspiracy theories on election machines (Byrne suggested Trump seize the machines following the 2020 election) and asked, “How can you certify a vote that was done with uncertifiable — uncertified machines?” Savin then reiterated, “So what's Trump going to do? He can't certify the election. He lets it go forward, and let's have the food fight after the fact."
What comes next when “the core belief of the MAGA movement is we won the 2020 election.”
The election denial movement has not accomplished many of the key goals it’s set for itself. The SAVE America Act has no apparent path to become law. Trump has yet to issue a national emergency declaration or an executive order to take control of state election systems. The administration’s many efforts to uncover supposedly widespread noncitizen voting haven’t produced any tangible evidence of its existence.
These are real losses, but Trump and his media allies remain dedicated to subverting elections in the United States. As Bannon recently said to CBS News, “The core belief of the MAGA movement is we won the 2020 election." That load-bearing lie continues to animate Trump’s movement, and there is no reason to believe that it will be any different on Election Day or in the days after.
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AN ATL MO 9 26 EMERGENCY MART LAW
On Wednesday, new reporting revealed that many in President Donald Trump's orbit believe he will declare "martial law" to seize control of the midterms. This is according to the Atlantic, which spoke with several people close to Trump who asserted he is likely to claim a "national security emergency" to justify efforts to "seize control of the federal elections."
For example, attorney Peter Ticktin -- who went to school with Trump when they were teenagers, helped Trump sue Hillary Clinton, and pushed the president to pardon convicted election equipment tamperer Tina Peters — said there are three possible outcomes in November. As the Atlantic writes, he asserts that, "The first — a smooth election — won’t happen in his view because, he claims without evidence, Democrats already cheated in the primaries. The second is that Trump takes action before the election to prevent cheating. The last option is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around November 3." Or in Ticktin's words, "Either martial law, or step aside." When the Atlantic raised the possibility of riots if Trump were to overturn the election results, Ticken said he was not concerned, asserting, "Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are."
Trump has not been shy about signaling his intention to meddle in the midterms. As the Atlantic explains, "In August, when the television and radio host Wayne Allyn Root pushed Trump to declare a 'national-security emergency' to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and other measures, Trump played coy: 'Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.' Later that month, Trump posted a Root column on the topic, with a headline that described the plan as 'foolproof.' Peters announced after meeting with Trump in June that the president 'basically said to his lead counsel to do what I was asking.' In a prime-time address at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump again repeated the false claim that he had won the 2020 election, and sarcastically encouraged his supporters to 'cheat like hell' in the upcoming elections."
And MAGA literally applauds such plans. Speaking at a recent conference for election deniers, Root described a "nightmare scenario" in which Democrats won, flipped Congress, then impeached the president. He received a standing ovation after assuring attendees that, according to research done by a friend, the election would be upended if Trump were to declare a national-security emergency."
Trump is so adamant about these efforts that, according to the Atlantic, "Trump’s White House and Cabinet advisers have been working for months to move Trump’s focus away from baseless theories of election fraud peddled by people like Ticktin, Root and Peters ... But the prospect of Trump deciding to act on the demands of his most fervent election-denying supporters has remained a constant threat, one that even Trump’s inner circle admits remains possible."
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MMA
Steve Bannon’s guest admits that a national emergency declaration on elections would likely be overturned by the Supreme Court
Brian Kennedy threw cold water on a central pillar of MAGA’s efforts to subvert the midterm elections, the latest setback for the movement and a sign they don't believe they'll get an emergency declaration before the midterms
Written by John Knefel
Published 09/16/26
A guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast acknowledged on September 16 that if President Donald Trump is going to declare a national emergency and try to seize power over election systems, the order would definitely be challenged in court and would almost certainly be overturned.
Brian Kennedy, senior fellow at MAGA-aligned think tank the Claremont Institute and frequent War Room guest, argued that Wayne Allyn Root, another Bannon favorite, was wrong in claiming that a national emergency declaration would be unreviewable by courts.
“With all due respect to Wayne Allyn Root — I myself have said we need very firm executive action, I’ve said it last year and I said it this year — but I always thought it would be challenged legally and taken to the Supreme Court,” Kennedy said.
“And Wayne Allyn Root and that national security emergency memorandum would almost — excuse me, would certainly — certainly be challenged by the Supreme Court,” he continued. “There's no mechanism by which the president has unilateral authority over this."
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From the September 16, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room.
Bannon later returned to Root’s theory — including a reference to Peter Ticktin, a lawyer aligned with Root — only for Kennedy to repeat his earlier analysis of the flaws to their approach.
“Wayne Allyn Root — the underlying thesis of him and Ticktin and these people is that if the president declares a national security emergency and lays out his reasons for it, that’s virtually bulletproof in the courts,” Bannon said. “You don’t buy that?”
“No, I think they misread the underlying court case that justifies their position in doing so,” Kennedy replied.
“Doing a national security emergency declaration like this would immediately cause one state to sue another state, or states to sue the federal government in combination, and that would immediately go to the Supreme Court,” Kennedy added. “And we saw what the Supreme Court did with Brett Kavanaugh. He said there wasn’t time."
“The court itself is not on the side of the president,” Kennedy said. “It’s going to take the side of the states in this regard. This is something that needed to be hashed out over the last 18 months, and waiting until the last, you know, six weeks before the election is simply — is reasonably speaking not going to be enough time, the court is going to argue, for this to happen."
Kennedy concluded: “I applaud Wayne Allyn Root and Peter Ticktin for their overall thrust here, but when it comes to the actual application of the law here I think the other side is going to win out."
Bannon and guests seem resigned that Trump won’t issue a national emergency declaration before the midterms
For months, Bannon, Root, Ticktin, and others have been openly plotting to subvert the midterms by falsely claiming China has interfered in U.S. elections, then using that manufactured evidence as justification to declare a national emergency and seize control of election systems.
Kennedy’s remarks are the latest evidence that the election denial movement is faltering and appears to be pivoting to a new tactic: preemptively blaming the courts for any future Republican losses. After the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s efforts to limit mail-in ballots, election denier Cleta Mitchell acknowledged the headwinds her movement faced on Bannon’s September 15 episode.
“I don't see that there's anything that can be done on a broad scale before this election, unfortunately,” Mitchell said, adding: “There's so much wrong with this, but honestly I'm pretty tired of these weenies on the U.S. Supreme Court who keep siding with the Marxist girls."
Bannon sounded a similar note in closing out his September 16 episode, following his interview with Kennedy.
“We’ve got to get maniacally focused on this because November could be a wake-up call,” Bannon said. “We’ve just got to be honest with the people at the coalition — all of it, all these hard workers about voter integrity — we didn’t get the voter integrity that we want. So November is going to be what November is, and we’re going to have to live with it and deal with it after that.”
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President Donald Trump's loyalist and election denier, Tina Peters, is on a roadshow. Peters managed to score a commutation from a Democratic governor after her conviction for state crimes around the 2020 election. She was slated to be in jail for nine years. She only served 20 months.
The new election conspiracy roadshow drew the attention of CNN reporter Marshall Cohen, who spoke with host Dana Bash on Friday. Bash questioned whether Peters has able to do much since she's "preaching to the converted." Cohen explained it's all about access.
Peters has met with the White House, the Commerce and the Justice Departments.
"The question of influence is something we're going to find out as we get closer and closer to the midterms and see if the president enacts some of these very extreme and aggressive ideas and proposals that Tina Peters is pitching," Cohen warned. "You just saw on your screen photos of her meetings this week in Washington, D.C.. She sat down with Harmeet Dhillon, who is the chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division."
Dhillon has been pushing her own election changes while at the DOJ.
Peters also met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, which prompted questions on Lutnick's role in elections.
"The Commerce Department is home to the Census Bureau [which] put out a report claiming that there were tons of non-citizens voting in elections," Cohen explained. "It suggests that the office is also trying to play in this space, which is why it's notable that Tina Peters is meeting with him."
He said he spoke with Peters' lawyer Peter Ticktin, "who is also pushing for some very aggressive moves before the election."
According to his comments, Peters "has a plan."
"And I don't know whether, you know, she'll get the support to make sure her plan gets implemented. Her plan differs from mine greatly. It's still going to need an emergency order in order to have it happen," Ticktin said.
The idea of declaring a national emergency so the president can take over the 2026 midterm elections isn't a "hypothetical situation," said Stateline.
Nick Brown, Washington state’s Democratic attorney general, said that they're already preparing for Trump's attempts to nationalize the election.
Last week, when asked about nationalizing the election, Trump told a conservative commentator, "Stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”
Trump has yet to hit the "nuclear option," said Cohen. He also noted all of this is coming, again, because Democratic Gov. Jared Polis (Co.) commuted Peters' sentence, releasing her early.
"He said, it's the right thing to do, but he's disappointed in what she's up to in Washington," said the reporter.
The other thing that is making officials "lose their mind," Cohen said, is that Peters could be appointed to a post to consult on election security for the state of California. The post was offered by the Shasta County election official, who is a 2020 election denier.
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npr?
Shasta County’s outgoing elections chief wants to hire Peters as a consultant, but questions remain about parole restrictions and county approval.
Shasta County’s top elections official, Clint Curtis, said he wants to hire former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters as a consultant in the county elections office.
Curtis said Peters could replace Brent Turner, his top deputy, who is currently on medical leave.
Peters was convicted in 2024 of seven charges, including four felonies, stemming from a breach of election equipment while she served as clerk in Mesa County, Colorado. Prosecutors said Peters allowed unauthorized access to the equipment as she sought evidence to support false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis commuted Peters’ nearly nine-year sentence in May, and she was released from prison on parole June 1.
“Tina Peters has a great deal of experience in elections and actually cares if they are fair,” Curtis said in an email.
Since leaving prison, Peters has made appearances on news outlets and at events, where she has continued to promote false claims about the 2020 election.
"Tina Peters is giving consideration to helping in the efforts in Shasta County, as there most definitely has been monkey business in the way the election was handled," said Peter Ticktin, Peters' lawyer.
Shasta County has become a center of disputes over election administration in recent years, as some residents and officials have promoted unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud.
The Shasta County Board of Supervisors appointed Curtis as county clerk and registrar of voters in 2025. He pledged to overhaul the county’s election system and make it more transparent and secure.
Voters rejected Curtis in the June primary, choosing former Assistant Registrar of Voters Joanna Francescut to replace him. She will take office in January.
The Board of Supervisors also censured Curtis this month over findings that he violated county personnel policies and engaged in disrespectful and abusive conduct toward staff. Curtis has disputed the findings and accused employees of sabotaging his efforts to reform the elections office.
County Supervisor Matt Plummer said he had received many emails and phone calls from people concerned about Peters potentially working in the elections office.
"To the extent it could happen, it seems likely to only increase those divisions and heighten tensions," he said.
Whether Peters could take the job remains unclear.
Curtis said he would like to hire her as a consultant rather than as a regular county employee.
"That way, I can protect her from false accusations by having her work without actual access to the voting system," he said.
Peters remains on parole in Colorado and would need permission to travel outside the state. Deputy County Executive Officer Stewart Buettell said Peters has not filed a job application with the county.
Buettell said hiring a consultant would follow a different process from hiring a regular employee. Curtis may also need approval from the Board of Supervisors before hiring Peters.
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06/30/26
Cleta Mitchell reacts to the Supreme Court late-arriving mail-in ballots ruling by saying it's time to challenge early voting
Mitchell to Steve Bannon: “There's a lot in that opinion that would suggest that we ought to be challenging early voting. We ought to be challenging unfettered absentee voting.”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 06/30/26
Video
Citation
From the June 29, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
CLETA MITCHELL (GUEST): You know, I think that - I don't know, but Amy Coney Barrett writes for the majority, and this is what is shocking, is that there are five justices of the Supreme Court who believe and who wrote in this opinion that there is a difference between casting the ballot, that is when the voters make their choice, and when the ballot is received. That makes no sense.
Frankly, according to their opinion, I actually think that this gives us good grounds to challenge early voting and to say that voting is — there's a lot in that opinion that would suggest that we ought to be challenging early voting. We ought to be challenging unfettered absentee voting because they also point out, which Marc Elias conveniently forgets to discuss, that — repeatedly they referred to the fact that the ballots had to be postmarked on or before election day.
Well, California doesn't require a postmark. I think we ought to challenge that. I think that what we have to do on our side is that we have to do what the left has done. And I know that that when Stephen Miller started America First Legal Foundation after — in 2021, the idea was to build a judicial attack mob that's similar to what the left has. And we haven't really done that.
I mean, they — there are — we've done a lot better. But these guys, the left challenges everything. And we are getting these terrible decisions from these awful left-wing trial court judges all over the country. And then this decision — to me, the worst part of this decision is it emboldens these left-wing crazy judges that are inhabiting our courts all over the country. That's the constitutional crisis we face, is all of these judges.
But I will tell you that I think that there is a roadmap in this. Unfortunately, it requires congressional action and we see how terrible Congress, the US Senate is. So I mean it's, we have a crisis because the judges are not letting the president do his job and they're trying to do Congress's job.
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bannon mma 7 26
June 30, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
STEVE BANNON (HOST): SAVE America Act — a lot of people are saying, hey, do we have time to implement it? Are we going to have lawsuits? But President Trump is driving forward. We're a huge proponent of that.
We also know that Bill Pulte is at DNI, and that John Solomon of Real America's Voice is leading a task force on declassification. And yesterday, Pulte hired, from the RNC, as his chief of staff, one of the top election fraud people in all of the RNC to be his chief of staff. So he's telling you where he's — signaling where he's going on this.
My understanding — I don't have any access to this classified information — but my understanding is that there is going to be real revelations about the stealing of the 2020 election.-
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mma
Election deniers reach a fever pitch calling for a “national emergency” declaration so Trump can give himself “king-like powers” over the midterms
Tina Peters: “I believe Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines and say ... that a vendor cannot have that much influence over our elections”
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 06/30/26
After President Donald Trump issued an executive order at the end of March aimed at stopping supposed fraud with mail-in ballots, election deniers have urged Trump to declare a national emergency to allow a federal takeover of election processes. On June 24, Trump echoed those calls and suggested that passing a bill to supposedly combat election fraud is a “national emergency.”
Media figures who have pushed claims of widespread election fraud — some of whom say they have been involved with drafting such an order that is “sitting on his [Trump’s] desk” — have urged Trump to give himself “king-like powers” by implementing the proposal, as it would supposedly empower Trump to “be able to make the rules” and use the National Guard to oversee midterm elections. Others claim that they have asked Trump directly to invoke the proposed order, saying it would be “very easy” for the president to “issue an executive order through a national emergency and have the National Guard count those ballots by hand.”
Election deniers drafted executive order declaring a national emergency to implement election policies and Trump issued an executive order on mail-in ballots
- Since at least April 2025, a group of right-wing figures and Trump allies have called for Trump to issue a national emergency declaration “to make sure that the elections in 2026 are secure,” even proposing and circulating among Trump administration officials a draft executive order that would “declare a national emergency” and “empower the president to ban mail ballots and voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference.” Those involved include attorney Peter Ticktin, former Infowars staffer Jerome Corsi, and QAnon influencer Wayne Willot, known online as Juan O. Savin.
During his second term, Trump has issued two executive orders related to elections. As explained by The New York Times, a March 2025 order instructs the Election Assistance Commission “to require people to show government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, and directs state or local officials to record and verify the information,” and it “seeks to require states to count ballots by Election Day.” Multiple federal judges have since blocked that executive order.
On March 31, Trump issued an executive order that directs the Department of Homeland Security to “compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State,” and instructs the U.S. Postal Service to “transmit ballots only to individuals enrolled on a State-specific Mail-in and Absentee Participation List.” NPR reported that “election experts said the order was unconstitutional.” After Trump signed the executive order, election deniers hailed it as a “win” that will leave Democrats “toast.” On June 25, a federal judge blocked parts of the order.
While Trump reportedly “shrugged off reports that he could consider declaring a national emergency around the midterm elections,” he has repeatedly advocated for the SAVE America Act, which would put restrictions on voting but has struggled to pass in Congress. On June 24, Trump canceled plans to sign bipartisan housing legislation “until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.”
- ## Since Trump issued the executive order in March, election deniers have repeatedly urged Trump to also declare a national emergency ahead of the midterms
- Savin, who wasinvolvedwith the proposed national emergency executive order,claimedthat Trump “is going to have to declare a national election emergency that gives him essentially king-like powers within the area of elections.”He added that the proposal is “sitting on his [Trump’s] desk, the 17-page order which my team put together within the coalition.” He’s also claimed that Trump “wants to sign it and [is] having the legal people review it to make sure that we got everything right,” may try to issue the order in “bite-sized pieces,” and that Trump has “tried to break up” the proposed order and it will “ultimately … get sealed in one summary executive order at some point in time, but they’ve taken a couple of pieces out and done them individually.”
- Ticktin, also supposedlyinvolvedwith the proposed order,saida national “election emergency” would allow Trump to “be able to make the rules.” He also said that it would give Trump “additional forces of some sort” like the National Guard to have “camera observation” of ballots and make “sure the counting is done and done correctly.”
- Corsi, another figure supposedlyinvolvedwith the proposed order, said that hebelievedTrump is “very strategically laying out his plans” with multiple executive orders related to elections and “saving his powder for that one last executive order, which will come much closer to the election.” He also claimed that the “nightmare” of Trump’s impeachment and removal by a Democratic-controlled Congress “can be avoided by that kind of an executive order” and Trump’s authority under the national emergency could “extend to utilizing the National Guard to intervene in states that didn’t cooperate.” During another appearance in which he discussed the order, Corsi claimed that “politically, Donald Trump cannot afford to let the 2026 midterm election occur under the current rules because he will most certainly lose. And that’s not going to happen.”
- Former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peterssaidduring a stream following her release from prison that she had spoken with the president and she believes “Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines and say that they are — that a vendor cannot have that much influence over our elections.”She also said on a separate podcast that “we need to get rid of the machines” and “mail-in ballots,” and Trump “needs to sign an executive order ... saying it’s unconstitutional that these things are allowed to be done.” Corsi has also claimed that Peters will “play a major role in one of the key factors in Trump ultimately declaring the need for the elections to be supervised by the federal government.”
- Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock CEO who has been aprominent fundraiserfor election denial efforts andplayed a rolein trying to overturn the 2020 election,saidTrump should announce a national emergency to “run our election this year ... and teach them how to run them in Iraq.”He later added that he hoped the president would declare an emergency “this summer.” Byrne is supposedly involved with the proposed order.
- Savin’s supposed “chief of staff,”Matt Meck,saidthe proposed national emergency order is “what we think needs to be done.”Meck — a board member of Fight Voter Fraud Inc., an organization which “has been criticized in the past for repeatedly advancing unfounded claims based on its misinterpretation of voter registration information and other data” — is supposedly involved with the proposed order.
- Mark Cook, described byColorado Newslineas one “of the most influential election deniers in Colorado,”said, “How much more of an emergency do we need to establish here? It's right in our faces, and we have to do something immediately.” Cook is also supposedly involved with the proposed order.
- Laura Scharr, thefounderof South Carolina Safe Elections,saidthat “it can’t just be an executive order — they’ve blown off the other two executive orders [related to elections] that Trump put out.”She added, “The only way is through a national emergency.” Scharr, who is supposedly involved with the proposed order, concluded that “it must be a national emergency. It has to happen as soon as possible.”
- Wayne Allyn Root — a radio host who hasclaimedthat mail-in ballots were used to “rig and steal the 2020 election” and who the Nevada Currentreportedis “known for subscribing to conspiracy theories”— has authoredmultiple columnsfor The Gateway Pundit advocating for the proposed national emergency. On his show, Root claimed to have texted the president about a national emergency and he said that he would urge Trump to “sign Jerome Corsi’s executive order on election integrity, Mr. President, and do it now.”
- John Goodman, who ispart ofthe “Florida Election Integrity Committee,”saidonStern American's “election integrity call” that “if you like the SAVE Act, you should love the national security emergency even more because it's like the SAVE Act on steroids,“ and that such a declaration “will be the trick, unobstructed.” He has also claimed that the call for “a national security emergency on elections” based on his ideas has been “very well received by Trump's legal team.” Root has said that “John Goodman, my election expert, has been telling me” that a national emergency is “the way to go,” and he claimed that Goodman “sent me all the reasons … as to what I could pass on to President Trump to push the urgency of a executive order to deal with election fraud and election integrity.” Corsi has also claimed to “have been working with” Goodman.
- Linda Szynkowicz, thefounderof Fight Voter Fraud Inc.,claimedon her podcast that the Constitution “gives the president the power in a state of emergency from foreign intervention in the elections,” for which “we have more than enough proof.” She made this claim in response to Goodman’s call for a “national security emergency.”
- David Clements, a podcaster“criss-crossed the country to who hasevangelize about purported election fraud,”saidat a local Republican event in Oregon that it would be “very easy” for Trump to “issue an executive order through a national emergency and have the National Guard count those ballots by hand.”During a podcast appearance with Corsi, Clements also claimed that he did not see “any scenario where we can run a clean election without the aid of the National Guard.”
- Douglas Franksaidin an appearance alongside Ticktin on theTake Your Power Back Showthat “we have people all over the country ready to support the president in case he needs to make some kind of emergency order.” The Los Angeles Times reported that Frank has given speeches across the country as “part of a multi-pronged effort by the election denial movement to make a significant impact on future elections.”
- Tamara Favorito — who reportedlyhelps runthe “election integrity” organization VoterGA with her husband, Garland Favorito —saidon a stream that Trump “needs to hurry” to declare a national emergency “because November is not very far away.” After being asked if there was “enough time before the midterms for” Trump to declare “the national security emergency and executive orders that mandate the things that make elections safe,” Favorito responded that “if the election officials in the counties put their mind to it, I believe it can be done, but he [Trump] needs to hurry because November is not very far away.”
- Gregory Stenstrom, a Pennsylvaniapoll watcherwhoclaimedwithout evidence that he saw votes for Biden being uploaded to voting machines in 2020,saidonStern American’s “election integrity call” that “Trump is required to take executive action.” Stenstrom said, “In the executive order that is being drafted by Peter Ticktin and Mr. Corsi, they can refer to multiple cases within the courts right now that show that President Trump is required to take executive action because certain secretaries of state and certain county officials in key counties are cheating and not complying with the law.” Stenstrom was also part of a lawsuit that reportedly alleged that there was “negligent and fraudulent misrepresentation related to the 2020 general election,” but which a local district attorney said there was “no merit found to the claims.”
- ## Why this sounds familiar and continues to matter
- Trump and his right-wing media allies have been pushing claims of election fraud for years. During Trump's second term, election deniers known for promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have been given access to the levers of power — feeding already debunked claims to the Department of Justice, taking roles in the administration, and contributing to federal investigations. Some, like Peters, Byrne, and Martin Rodil, claimed they have spoken directly with Trump and administration officials. (The Guardian reported Rodil became a source “for the Trump camp and ultimately for investigators and … promoted two major allegations about Venezuela.”)
As the 2026 midterms approach, right-wing media and the Trump administration appear to have ramped up their efforts to undermine the midterm elections — invoking repeatedly debunked conspiracy theoriesabout widespread election fraud in the U.S., relying on one-off incidents and hypotheticals that are often exaggerated or misleading, and pushing for Trump policy priorities like the SAVE America Act.
Election deniers have already claimed that primaries for the 2026 midterms have featured election fraud, and Savin himself has claimed that the primary elections have been “laying the groundwork” for Trump to declare a national emergency — language which the president has now repeated.
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6 26 mma vegas baby, stop steal reboot, election integrity bs
At election denial summit, media figures endorse ICE at the polls and suggest executing a “prominent traitor” from the deep state “to improve our elections”
Podcaster David Clements: “The one thing that we need to see is a prominent traitor brought before you ... and after that due process, they get to suffer the legally prescribed penalty, which may or may not include a firing squad”
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 06/25/26
Last week, multiple promoters of election denial conspiracy theories spoke at a summit co-led by a QAnon influencer, calling on attendees to monitor voting precincts and to use “a tribunal” and a “legally prescribed penalty” like “a firing squad” as a possible solution to “improve our elections.” Some speakers touted connections to the Trump administration.
The Fraud-Fighter Summit, which took place between June 15-17 in Las Vegas, aimed to “confront fraud in elections” and featured “powerful presentations and discussions on topics such as tabulator vulnerabilities and advanced methods for detecting manipulation in election processes.” The event seems to have been coordinated by two figures in the election denial movement, Wayne Willott and Matt Meck. Willott, known online as Juan O. Savin, helped organize a coalition of election denial candidates for the 2022 midterm elections and claimed to have been involved with a proposed “national emergency” executive order for President Donald Trump to control elections. Meck is a board member of Fight Voter Fraud — an organization which “has been criticized in the past for repeatedly advancing unfounded claims based on its misinterpretation of voter registration information and other data,” — and also apparently Savin’s “chief of staff.”
Speakers and presenters included Tina Peters, Steve Bannon, Jim Marchant, David Clements, Peter Ticktin, Martin Rodil, and Douglas Frank.
Notable moments from the summit include:
- War Roomhost and former Trump official Steve Bannon appeared multiple times during the summit. During his appearances, Bannon told attendees that “we need to be at every precinct,” and said whether “you’re armed or not, that depends upon what your state laws are.” He also said “ICE has to be there and has to be there to back you up.”
Video
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From the Fraud-Fighter Summit on June 16, 2026, streamed on Rumble
- David Clements, a podcaster who Lawfarereportedhas “criss-crossed the country to evangelize about purported election fraud,” suggested at the summit “a tribunal” for “a prominent traitor” in the deep state could “improve our elections” as clerks will “start paying attention to executive orders.” While discussing Trump’s actions ahead of the midterm elections, Clements said, “When people ask me, ‘David, one thing, one thing to improve our elections,’ they’re thinking get rid of this machines, get rid of the e-poll book. And those are fair questions. The one thing that we need to see is a prominent traitor brought before you with due process, of course. And after that due process, they get to suffer the legally prescribed penalty, which may or may not include a firing squad. Then all of a sudden, all of a sudden your clerks are gonna start paying attention to executive orders.” He also suggested that Trump invoking the Defense Production Act for military stockpiles meant that somehow the president had “declared a national emergency” and was urging Washington to “restore elections.”
Video
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From the Fraud-Fighter Summit on June 17, 2026, streamed on Rumble
- Martin Rodil, a Venezuelan expatriate who haspromoted the conspiracy theorythat Venezuela was involved with election fraud in America, claimed that he “recently met with a U.S. government official who has been on top of investigating” the conspiracy theory and told Rodil that he only “found 5% of the problem.” While introducing Rodil, Meck said that Rodil had “been briefing” former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the White House, Trump administration official Kurt Olsen, and the Department of Justice.
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From the Fraud-Fighter Summit on June 17, 2026, streamed by UnAuthorized
- Juan O. Savin spoke on a panel that also included Tina Peters and Peter Ticktin. Ticktin is an attorney for Peters who has also represented Donald Trump, and he was reportedly involved with the draft national emergency executive order related to elections. Peters is a former county clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, who was “convicted in 2024 for her role in a brazen plot to examine voting machines under her control after the 2020 election” before Colorado Gov. Jared Polis commuted her sentence. During the talk, Savin said the executive order proposal was a “coalition effort” that Ticktin “helped push … with the president,” and Ticktin appeared to agree with Savin that there needed to be a “pause” on the midterm elections to stop supposed election fraud.
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From the Fraud-Fighter Summit on June 17, 2026, streamed on the “Bannons War Room” Rumble channel
- Petersappeared on stage withSavin, who hasclaimed to have advised herover the years, and said election fraud can “happen in every country around the world. And, of course, they’re trying to do it to our country.”
Video
Citation
From a video of the Fraud-Fighter Summit uploaded to Telegram on June 16, 2026
- Jim Marchant — the currentRepublican nomineefor Nevada secretary of state who alsopartnered with Savinin 2022 to put together a coalition of election denial candidates — suggested that if elected, “I will get rid of the machines. We’re going to get rid of mail-in ballots.”He continued, “We’re going to vote on a precinct level basis, and we’re going to count the vote on a precinct level basis, and we’re finally going to have a fair election here in Nevada.” Savin, who was on stage with Marchant, urged attendees to support Marchant’s campaign.
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From the Fraud-Fighter Summit on June 16, 2026, streamed on Rumble
- In addition to U.S. elections, the summit also featured substantial discussion of Brazil and South Korea, both of whichhave been a focusfor far-right American pundits in recent years. The first night of the summit was in part dedicated to a movie about former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. One speaker at the conference was Douglas Frank, who visited South Korea as part of a “Korea-US Election Fraud Joint Investigation Team.” Frank claimed the people of South Korea had “lost their country” after “corrupt elections.” During his appearance, Frank also spoke with former South Korean Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, who claimed via translator that “the days of election fraud will be numbered.”
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MMA
Election deniers push conspiracy theories about primaries in GOP-run Texas
QAnon figure Juan O. Savin: “People were just floored by what was going on” in Texas with the “massive cheating”
Written by Alex Kaplan
:{Published 04/20/26
Election deniers have been targeting this year’s primary and special elections in Texas, claiming there has been “massive” fraud and cheating.
Attorney Peter Ticktin, activist Linda Szynkowicz, QAnon influencer Wayne Willott, and others who promoted false claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential contest are now claiming on social media and on podcasts that in Texas, votes “got switched,” people used “ghost voting IDs,” and they found “cloned voters.”
For years, right-wing media and politicians have been pushing conspiracy theories about supposed election fraud across the country, and recent claims seem to be part of an apparent effort to undermine the 2026 midterm elections.
Election deniers are now targeting elections in GOP-run Texas}:
- On March 3, the Republican and Democratic parties in Texas held primary elections for various elected offices throughout the state. Among the notable primary wins were Republican Gov. Greg Abbott defeating challenger Pete “Doc” Chambers for the GOP gubernatorial nomination and Democratic state Rep. James Talarico besting U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination. Texas also held a special election in January for what The Texas Tribune reported was a “solidly red Texas Senate seat,” with Democrat Taylor Rehmet winning the seat in a “stunning special election upset.”
Republicans have full control of the Texas government, and a Republican-appointed secretary of state serves as the state's chief election officer.
- ## Election deniers claimed “massive fraud” happened during the recent Texas primary and special elections
- Multiple prominent election deniers have claimed that there was “massive fraud” and “massive cheating” that tainted the Texas primary and special elections and that they “should not be certified.” They pushed a variety of conspiracy theories, claiming votes “got switched,” that there were “ghost voting IDs,” and that they found “cloned voters”:
- During several podcast appearances, Peter Ticktin, an attorney and commentator with a history of promoting election fraud claims, said that “we better start investigating what happened in the Texas primaries.” He invoked a longstanding conspiracy theory that Venezuela is connected to supposed election fraud, saying voting machines somehow controlled by Venezuela switch votes and “this is how they have control of the outcome of the elections.” He also alleged that 21st Congressional District candidate Weston Martinez found “modified duplicates” in the voter rolls after the first day of voting during this year’s GOP primary and later found that the duplicates in the rolls had been “changed to other names” or “they got rid of them because he was on to it.” Ticktin continued, “One way or the other, these machines are now in play picking the candidates … which we are going to be voting for come November.”
A show host asked if the Texas gubernatorial primary was “an Antrim County situation,” referring to a Michigan county where some falsely claimed that machines changed votes in 2020, and asked if votes for Chambers and Abbott “got switched.”
“Our election system is entirely compromised,” Ticktin replied. “The same voter base, the same voter rolls, the same machines can operate on any election in the United States.”
- Fight Voter Fraud Inc. founder Linda Szynkowicz said on her streaming show that in Texas, “they were manipulating the votes as they were coming in the system.”
- Kris Jurski, whom NBC describes as “a Florida activist who has promoted election conspiracy theories,” suggested on social media that his tool to supposedly detect election fraud also found “cloned voters … in Texas’s latest election.”
- Wayne Willott, a QAnon influencer who goes by “Juan O. Savin,” said during a streaming conversation that “people were just floored by what was going on” in Texas with the “massive cheating.” Willott, who has tried to recruit election denial candidates for positions administering elections, suggested “a restart” for Texas’ primaries, pointing in a separate conversation to “massive fraud.”
- :{Video
Citation
From the March 18, 2026, edition of Nino's Corner, streamed on YouTube
- Harry Haury, whom the LA Times described as a “self-proclaimed cybersecurity expert” with “deep ties to the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement,” said during right-wing podcast Stern American’s“election integrity call” that Texas’ primaries were “a large mess,” with “hundreds of thousands of votes that are attributed to an individual, and then that individual is deleted from the record.”
He said the elections “appear[ed] to be tampered with,” and the state had “not produced an honest or transparent result,” and therefore it “should not be certified.”
- :{Video
Citation
From the March 18, 2026, edition of Stern American, streamed on Rumble
- On his podcast, election denier Joe Oltmann read a social media post from Chambers alleging fraud in his race and other races in the state, both Democratic and Republican, and Oltmann said that it was evidence of “election fraud” and that “everywhere you turn elections are being stolen.”
- John Case — an attorney for former Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted for allowing unauthorized access to county voting equipment over election fraud claims — claimed during another Stern American “election integrity call” that “Bexar County in the Texas primary” featured “some kind of illegal interference in the list of people who voted.” Case, whom Colorado's The Daily Sentinel described as an “election conspiracy theorist,” has previously claimed that there was a supposed witness who claimed “the software used on Dominion Voting Systems in Colorado has the same basic structure as the Smartmatic software that was used to rig elections in Venezuela.” According to Case, this witness “was a government official in Venezuela whose job was to create the war rooms and situation rooms that were used to monitor the election results and then, when the time was ripe, to inject fake votes into the system so that the government candidate would always win.”
- Additionally, John Eastman, a Claremont Institute senior fellow who crafted a plan for Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election results, claimed on Stern American that a January special election for a Texas state Senate seat featured “ghost voting IDs based on actual voter IDs.”
- ## Yes, this probably sounds very familiar
- Right-wing figures and social media users have cried fraud about other recent elections as well. That includes the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, where Republican Kari Lake lost to now-Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs; the 2021 New Jersey gubernatorial election, where then-Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli; and the 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial election, where now-Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill defeated Ciattarelli.
- ## Why do they keep claiming fraud?
- Some right-wing media figures are calling for new policies and efforts to prevent supposed election fraud ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The Trump administration has pushed the SAVE America Act, which would curtail voting access, and right-wing media claim Democrats oppose it because they are “cheating.”
Trump’s FBI also raided the Fulton County, Georgia, election center as part of a Justice Department probe of the 2020 election, and Trump released an executive order seeking to limit who is eligible for mail-in voting, drawing praise from election deniers. Some of these activists have also drafted and advocated for a “national emergency” executive order to allow a federal takeover of election processes.
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At Summit, Election Deniers Press for Trump to Take Over Midterms — ProPublica
Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that activists associated with those at the summit have been circulating a draft of an executive order that would ban mail-in ballots and get rid of voting machines as part of a federal takeover. Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who worked on the executive order and had a client at the summit, told ProPublica these actions were “all part of the same effort.”...
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WIKI EFM
DoJ pardon attorney
On May 13, 2025 Martin announced he would serve as the pardon attorney, vowing to review the Biden administration's outgoing pardons.[27] He also announced that he would head a "Weaponization Working Group" within the United States Department of Justice, saying, "When it comes to the problem of weaponization. . . . that's what the Biden administration, they didn't tell you what they were doing they just targeted people," and "if they can be charged, we'll charge them. But if they can't be charged, we will name them . . . and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed."[28] On May 22, he met with Peter Ticktin of the American Rights Alliance. Ticktin recommended full pardons for Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes; for Proud Boys members Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola; and for Dan Wilson and Elias Costianes, former January 6 defendants who are currently in prison for unrelated charges.[84] Separately, in a podcast episode that aired May 22, Martin said of the two men convicted of plotting in 2020 to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer: "we can't leave these guys behind".[85] On May 26, Martin described the rationale for granting pardons as "No MAGA left behind".[86]
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OMG AN 3 26
President Donald Trump is a Republican and Colorado Governor Jared Polis is a Democrat, but it looks like Polis is bending to Trump’s pressure that Polis commute the sentence of an election denier — and members of both parties are furious at Polis
"Justice in Colorado and America needs to be applied evenly, you never know when you might need to depend on the rule of law," Polis wrote on the social platform X about the possibility of pardoning or commuting the sentence of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters. "This is the context I am using as I consider cases like this that have sentencing disparities."
Polis argued in his post that Peters’ sentence is analogous to that of a former state lawmaker recently sentenced to probation and community service after being convicted of one of the same crimes. Yet as journalist Jordan Rubin pointed out at MS NOW, those two cases were very different in important ways.
“Jaquez Lewis was convicted of one count of attempting to influence a public servant and three counts of forgery,” Rubin wrote, explaining that Lewis forged letters to refute allegations she was mistreating her staff and expressed remorse. By contrast, Peters has never expressed remorse for much more serious crimes — per the state conviction, “While serving as the Clerk and Recorder of Mesa County, Ms. Peters deceived county employees to obtain credentials that allowed an unauthorized person to access Mesa County’s voting system after the 2020 election.” He added “even after her conviction, she reaffirmed her position that her conduct was justified by her conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.”
Judge Matthew Barrett, who sentenced Peters, said “this case was about your corrupt conduct and how no one is above the law.” He added, “I consider deterrence in sentencing that is both general and specific that the sentence I impose must deter Ms. Peters from engaging in similar conduct in the future, but it also must deter others generally from engaging in this type of conduct.”
Peters was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant and one count each of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with requirements of Colorado’s secretary of state. She allowed QAnon conspiracy theorists to access sensitive voter information in the hope to find evidence of voter fraud, which whenever produced.
“The suggestion that everyone convicted under the same statute should receive the same sentence overlooks why the legislature created a [sentencing] range in the first place: no two crimes and no two defendants are the same,” said Dan Rubinstein, the Republican prosecutor who worked to convict Peters. He added that modifying her sentence “would be a gross injustice to the affected citizens I represent.” In addition to being tried by a Republican prosecutor, Peters is in a county that Trump won by 28 percentage points.
Rubin himself wrote, “Still, as with another of Trump’s pardons for 2020 election–related crimes, the legally limp move sent a strong signal that the president supports the subversive behavior taken on his behalf and, as importantly, that he’ll continue to support such behavior in the future however he can.”
Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, said on Thursday that he shares Rubin’s concern.
“Tina Peters knowingly broke the law, undermined our elections, and was rightfully convicted by a jury of her peers,” Bennet said. “At a moment like this, we can’t capitulate to a lawless Administration.”
By contrast Peters’ lawyer Peter Ticktin insists that “(Peters) has been made to stay in prison because people are afraid of what she would say.” He also described her as a “political prisoner.”
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Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida lawyer who has various ties to Donald Trump and represents some 2020 election deniers, has become an outspoken advocate for an emergency executive order on US elections that would overhaul voting rules and rights by ending machine and mail-in voting.
The exact nature and extent of Ticktin’s contact and influence with Trump and other administration officials is not clear. But election experts and analysts see Ticktin’s push for an executive order as worrying, and part of a broader drive by fellow election conspiracists who are now promoting similar and legally dubious emergency order plans to revamp voting rules this year in order to boost Republican fortunes in the fall elections.
A 17-page draft order dated April 2025 that Ticktin has shared with the Guardian and other news outlets would make far-reaching changes in voting rules. It would require all voters in 2026 to re-register with proof of citizenship, end the use of vote-tabulation machinery and compel hand-counting of all ballots, require that counting for all races be finished on election day by midnight, ban mail-in ballots, and make other changes.
Ticktin, who attended New York Military Academy as a teenager with Trump and in 2020 penned the book What Makes Trump Tick, told the Guardian he has urged Trump to take action on an executive order, which would give the president extraordinary powers. “I’ve emailed Trump about the need for an emergency order,” he said.
The draft order cites dubious claims of foreign interference by China in 2020 to justify an emergency order now, and Ticktin also claims that Venezuela interfered in 2020. An emergency executive order should prioritize “hand-counting of ballots in public, first and foremost”, Ticktin said. He predicted with no evidence: “If we don’t have hand-counting of ballots, this election will be stolen.”
The delusion of easy victory from the air may have seduced the US into another war Read more
Ticktin said he is also in touch with other Trump administration contacts on executive order plans, which could sharply limit eligible voters and turnout, but he declined to identify them, citing concerns he’d lose access with those figures.
Ticktin’s role as a voluble advocate for an emergency order overlaps his ties to some better-known voting conspiracists who have also pressed the issue with Trump officials, and follows a checkered legal background. Ticktin’s law license was suspended twice over conflict of interest issues and making referral payments that were not permitted.
A version of the proposed executive order that Ticktin has been sharing was first published last April by a group tied to Cleta Mitchell, the Trump-allied lawyer and prominent election denier; it includes several proposals which have long been top priorities for election conspiracy advocates.
Election experts and analysts are sharply critical of Ticktin’s efforts and those of other election conspiracists pushing an emergency executive order that echo some widely discredited claims that Trump lost in 2020 due to election fraud.
“There’s a constantly shifting reference to different theories about things that happened six years ago,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of voting rights and elections at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. “People who want to change voting policies are looking for ways to justify the president doing that.”
Morales-Doyle noted that the Brennan Center and multiple other groups sued successfully last year to block key parts of a March 2025 Trump emergency executive order to change election procedures and assume powers that belong to the states and Congress. Some parts of Trump’s 2025 order are still being litigated on appeal.
More pointedly, Ticktin’s plan for hand-counting of all ballots in public, is “not only not feasible. but a surefire way to generate inaccuracies”, Morales-Doyle warned.
Like the president, election conspiracists suggest Trump’s 2020 defeat was due to voting fraud, even though such claims have been repeatedly rejected by courts and some former top Trump officials.
David Becker, who leads the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, noted that Trump and his allies lost 61 out of 62 court cases in the weeks after election day 2020, as they pushed claims of widespread fraud tainting the election results.
The drive by Ticktin and others for an emergency executive order comes as Trump and his Maga allies have voiced strong worries about losing control of Congress this fall, with polls showing Democrats likely to win the House and possibly take the Senate.
Trump has suggested at times that he might issue an executive order to try to impose voting changes before the 2026 elections: on social media on 13 February, Trump wrote broadly about a potential executive order on 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 … I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.”
Trump added: “There will be voter I.D. for the midterm elections whether approved by Congress or not,” referring to legislation that Congress has been considering.
But in late February in a comment to PBS, Trump seemed to throw cold water on the draft executive order Ticktin has been floating.
Trump’s main focus of late has instead been to prod the Senate to pass the Save America Act, which mandates that voters provide proof of citizenship such as a passport or birth certificate before voting, and imposes sharp limits on voting by mail and machines.
The Save Act has passed the House but faces much dimmer prospects in the Senate in part due to filibuster rules, prompting Trump to ratchet up pressure on Republican senators, while some Maga allies work to mobilize backing for an executive order.
Ticktin said a key goal of an executive order is to “limit noncitizen voting”, which historically is very rare, and noted that the Save Act wouldn’t require hand-counting of ballots in public.
The 2025 draft order that Ticktin has been promoting is entitled Establishing Security, Integrity, and Transparency for United States Elections with Protections Against Foreign Interference.
Ticktin said in his email to Trump and other administration contacts that he “made it clear that this is an ‘Election Emergency’, and that is the only way that the President has the authority to impose any new rules as to how the election is to be conducted”, adding he hopes Trump will “take action in time for the 2026 Mid-term Election”.
To bolster his case, Ticktin claimed the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, “has evidence of voting fraud and the machines. Gabbard has reports about Venezuela and voting fraud here”, adding that there’s also evidence of voting fraud with machines involving China and Serbia too.
An intelligence review in 2021 found that China considered ways to influence the 2020 election, but ultimately did not pursue them, although the draft order Tickton has pushed claimed Chinese interference.
Gabbard has been spearheading a review of election security that has reportedly focused on foreign influence including possible Venezuelan efforts, but no evidence has been provided to support some conspiracy theories that Venezuela worked with election machine companies to rig the 2020 election.
Last May, a team working for Gabbard investigated Puerto Rico’s voting machines without finding evidence of Venezuelan meddling, but her office told Reuters it found “concerning cyber security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections”.
Still, to press the case for a new executive order, Ticktin suggested that since Nicolás Maduro, the former Venezuelan president, is in US custody after being captured in January, he “has a choice to give us the information he has about the manipulation of elections, or start to spend the rest of his life in a supermax” prison.
Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at American University, told the Guardian he’s alarmed at the prospect of an executive order being pushed by Trump’s election-denying allies given their track record.
“Trump and some of his most sycophantic supporters have spent over five years pushing lies about voter fraud in the 2020 election,” he said.
Morales-Doyle stressed: “The arguments for why there’s an emergency keep shifting. Their unifying theme is their aim: to unlock some supposed set of emergency powers. The president doesn’t have power to run our elections or to write the rules governing our elections. And he doesn’t get those powers by declaring an emergency.”
One draft version of an emergency order from last April, as the Washington Post first reported, cited a 2018 executive order that declared an emergency to justify sanctions due to the targeting of election infrastructure by foreign sources. That emergency order was extended by Joe Biden, and in 2024 the treasury department imposed sanctions on Iranian and Russian entities citing the 2018 order.
“There is now clear and compelling evidence from court cases and forensic analysis that these threats have not been mitigated but instead have intensified,” reads the proposed draft from April 2025.
How the war in Iran and its economic fallout could lead to Trump’s defeat Read more
On another election front, Ticktin has exerted influence with the administration to help obtain a pardon from the president last December for his client Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who is serving a nine-year prison term on state charges related to breaking into voting equipment. Peters remains in jail since Trump has no authority over state crimes and presidential pardons only cover federal crimes.
Ticktin’s ties to Trump also surfaced in 2022 when he served on a legal team that unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit charging Democrats with conspiring to hurt Trump with allegations that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia. The judge who dismissed the lawsuit called it “frivolous” and issued sanctions against Ticktin and other lawyers on his team.
As Ticktin promotes the need for an executive order, he noted that some of his allies are also legal clients. They include Patrick Byrne, a multimillionaire who has been fighting a $1.6bn defamation battle with Dominion Voting Systems. The Dominion lawsuit alleges Byrne and others pushed “baseless claims” that the company was created in Venezuela to rig the 2020 election.
Dominion has previously won mammoth defamation lawsuits against Fox News and Newsmax for making false claims including allegations of ties to Venezuela.
On 19 February, Byrne attended a daylong “election integrity summit” in DC that Trump’s ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn spearheaded with a couple dozen election deniers such as Cleta Mitchell and several administration officials including Kurt Olsen, a 2020 election denier whom Trump tapped for an “election security and integrity” White House post, as ProPublica first reported.
Byrne, who spent millions of dollars trying to overturn the 2020 election results, told LindellTV that at some point Trump has “got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency”. Tickton said he didn’t attend the summit but told ProPublica it was “all part of the same effort” to build backing for an emergency order.
In his push for an executive order, Ticktin also cites the influence of Jerome Corsi, a known vote conspiracist who cynically pushed the Obama birther myth. Ticktin said Corsi taught him “that voter rolls have an abundance of fake people we call modified duplicates”.
To mobilize support for an executive order, Ticktin in early March addressed a crowd of election deniers at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, organized by Steve Stern, a conservative podcaster who posted a video of the event on his Rumble page.
In his talk, Ticktin cited the voting experience with machines in 2020 in Antrim county, Michigan, where initially votes for Trump flipped to Joe Biden. “Let me tell you that these machines are capable of changing the vote,” Ticktin told the gathering, adding that a lawsuit was filed to contest the Antrim results.
In that lawsuit, Matthew DePerno, a well-known election denier, alleged that Dominion tabulators and voting machines used by the county were fraudulent. But the Michigan supreme court dismissed the lawsuit and the election results remained certified.
Further, an investigation by the Michigan secretary of state’s office revealed human errors in the initial results that were unrelated to the county’s voting equipment.
Nonetheless, Ticktin seems to see the initial and erroneous Antrim results as evidence to support an emergency executive order. “The existence of the US as a free country is on the line here,” he warned the Guardian.
Ticktin cautioned: “I don’t know if the administration has their act together” about an emergency order.
Some veteran Republicans worry that an executive order will backfire legally and politically.
“The states will win in an executive order fight,” predicted Charlie Black, a Republican consultant, emphasizing that it would also be a “distraction and dangerous to the Republican brand. The states have done a good job of running elections for 250 years.”
Looking ahead, Noble stressed that the drive for an emergency executive order “is no longer just about a president’s vanity and inability to accept that he lost the 2020 election. It appears to be about a president and a contingent of allied election deniers who think they have the right to decide who gets to vote in elections according to their rules. If they succeed, it will badly damage our democracy.”
---
GGL 4 26 KURT OLSEN
[### Trump Will Take Control of the Midterms–If This Florida ...
Vanity Fair
https://www.vanityfair.com › News › donald trump](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-will-take-control-of-the-midterms-if-this-florida-lawyer-gets-his-way?srsltid=AfmBOorXvROVNQ4p679s91j_YD2tTcmTQOl0soklEqk5JNdLpk6vHcfY)
Mar 17, 2026 — Foreign interests are putting their thumb on the scale of our elections,” Peter Ticktin claims. Senator Mark Warner is answering with a ...
NO LNX
Trump Will Take Control of the Midterms–If This Florida Lawyer Gets His Way
“Foreign interests are putting their thumb on the scale of our elections,” Peter Ticktin claims. Senator Mark Warner is answering with a “prebunking” campaign.
By Chris Smith
March 17, 2026
:{:{Attorney Peter Ticktin listens during oral arguments for People vs Tina Peters in the Court of Appeals at the Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center in Denver on January 14, 2026.:}:
Chances are you have never heard of Peter Ticktin. That’s okay. Until a few years ago, most civilians did not recognize the names Dan Scavino or Laura Loomer or even Steve Bannon. Yet those three and others have all moved from the Republican fringes to become influential figures in President Donald Trump’s orbit.
Now, Ticktin, an 80-year-old South Florida lawyer, is aiming to play a key role in trying to upend 250 years of American election law by persuading Trump to issue an executive order that would allow the president to seize control of this fall’s midterm balloting process. “Well, he has to,” Ticktin tells Vanity Fair. “I wouldn’t recommend this to the president if it were not actually an election emergency occurring, where foreign interests are putting their thumb on the scale of our elections.”
How would they do that? It’s complicated. Ticktin connects dots alleging automated voting trickery stretching from Venezuela to Antrim County, Michigan, to Beijing. “The only reason Donald Trump is in office now is because the computer data center in Belgrade, Serbia, was disabled by certain American actors in 2024,” Ticktin says, mysteriously. “But they’re never going to let that happen again.” By “they,” he means the Chinese, the World Economic Forum, and the Democrats—who, Ticktin claims, are seeking a Senate majority next year in order to impeach Trump and Vice President JD Vance and install New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries as president.
:{:{All of which might be dismissed as garden-variety conspiracy, not to mention being beyond the organizational capacity of the Democratic Party. Except that Ticktin and Trump have a long history. The two men have known one another for 65 years, going back to their time as classmates at the New York Military Academy, a relationship Ticktin detailed in his 2020 book, What Makes Trump Tick.}:
What Makes Trump Tick: My Years with Donald Trump from New York Military Academy to the Present: Peter Ticktin: 9781645437116: Amazon.com: Books
What makes President Donald Trump tick? There's no better person to ask than Peter Ticktin, Donald Trump's former platoon sergeant who ran Company A for him at New York Military Academy, and lifelong friend. In What Makes Trump Tick: My Years with Donald Trump from New York Military Academy to the Present, Peter Ticktin outlines why he always has and always will stand behind 45. Including never-before-told stories of Donald Trump and their lives at New York Military Academy, What Makes Trump Tick is an eye-opening, firsthand account of the experiences that made Donald Trump the businessman, president, and simply the man he is today.
Ticktin is the founder of The Ticktin Law Group based in Deerfield Beach, Florida. After graduating from New York Military Academy, Mr. Ticktin received his first law degree from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, and began practicing law in Canada as a barrister in 1972. Within his first year of practice, he defeated the Uniform Summons, resulting in the dismissal of all misdemeanors that used the form within the Province of Ontario, and changed the criminal laws in Ontario's appellate courts and the Supreme Court of Canada.
In the mid-eighties, Mr. Ticktin relocated to Florida and commenced his effort to obtain his second law degree. He graduated cum laude from the University of Miami Law School, and was elected into the Order of the Coif, among numerous honors.
Mr. Ticktin's practice is eclectic and covers a broad band of legal work, from divorce to business litigation. He loves being before juries. He generally thinks outside of the proverbial box with creative approaches to achieve the most pragmatically sensible results where possible, and a good fight where not. He has had numerous cases before the appellate courts, including appearances before the Supreme Courts of Canada, Florida, and California. Moreover, he has changed the world by taking on HIV and AIDS cases when others were afraid to have someone infected come to their offices. He won a two week trial which was nationally televised on CourtTV after his clients 7-year-old child had his organs harvested by an organ procurement supervisor who forged his mother's permission. He again came to national attention when he was on the forefront of a mortgage foreclosure defense, when he unearthed the robo-signers and gave the attorney generals of all fifty states the basis they needed to win a $50 billion settlement. Mr. Ticktin remains in active practice and remains as young and vigorous as President Trump. Perhaps it was the NYMA food.
Product details
- Publisher : Mascot Books ENDIT
More recently, Ticktin was part of Trump’s legal team in a 2022 lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others that alleged a broad racketeering scheme to create false allegations against Trump’s 2016 campaign. “When I was hired to assist Alina Habba as local counsel in Florida, I had a long meeting with the president, and I said, ‘What do I call you?’ Because I’ve always called him Donald,” Ticktin says of his work on the lawsuit. “He looked at Alina and he said, ‘Oh, he can call me Donald, because after all, I’ve known him so long, and he is so much older than I am.’” Ticktin pauses.
“For the record, I’m four and a half months older than him.” (The lawsuit was eventually dismissed, with a federal judge calling it “frivolous” and issuing sanctions against Habba, Ticktin, and other lawyers. They appealed, but an appellate court affirmed the case’s dismissal and upheld the sanctions against the attorneys. Habba did not respond to a request for comment.)}:
Ticktin says he began talking with Trump about election-integrity issues at least a year ago, and followed up, most recently, in an email earlier this month. “I can’t stop,” he says, “because of what I know.” Ticktin is reluctant to get into detail about his “line of communication” with the administration, or about which Cabinet secretary he says is spearheading the midterms election-integrity effort. “They trust me,” he says. “I don’t want to act in a way that’s not trustworthy.”
A White House spokeswoman did not respond to questions regarding Trump’s relationship with Ticktin, and directed me to the president’s answer, on February 27, when a PBS reporter asked whether he was considering issuing an executive order related to the midterms. “No,” the president said. “I’ve never heard about it.”
:{:{Ticktin isn’t the only person trying to encourage Trump to seize control of the elections. Micheal Flynn, the former lieutenant general and first-term Trump national security adviser, has promoted the idea, as has the right-wing activist and author Jerome Corsi. Flynn convened a meeting in Washington last month billed as “a critical roundtable to address election integrity.”}:
According to ProPublica, the event attracted current administration officials Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer who is reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, who is in charge of election integrity at the Department of Homeland Security, as well as conservative activists including Cleta Mitchell, who has pushed false claims about noncitizen voting and now runs the Election Integrity Network.}:
:{:{Senator Mark Warner is trying to sound the alarm, even as potential election mischief is being overshadowed by life-and-death events like the war on Iran. “This is of critical importance,” the Virginia Democrat tells me. “One thing we should have learned about Trump is he doesn’t hide his intentions, including the notion to call for federal elections.”}:
Warner is particularly concerned that Trump officials could create a pretext for Trump to take over the voting. “Tulsi Gabbard is a disaster, and she’s chasing debunked theories about the 2020 election,” Warner says, referring to the director of national intelligence’s recent presence at the raid of an election office in Fulton County, Georgia. “She could be the perpetrator of this—putting out a raw piece of intelligence that purports to show foreign interference,” as an excuse for Trump’s intervention.}:
A Gabbard spokeswoman, Olivia Coleman, said she “would especially encourage you to focus on the very real vulnerabilities uncovered in the electronic voting machines.” Coleman also pointed me to a February letter from Gabbard to Warner and others in Congress saying the director’s office “will not irresponsibly share incomplete intelligence assessments concerning foreign or other malign interference in US elections.”
Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is hardly reassured. He is assembling a “prebunking” team of former intelligence officials who could knock down attempts at disinformation. “I have a sense of urgency on this,” Warner says. “When we’re talking about Laura Loomer being able to call the shots on who does and doesn’t get jobs in the administration, and bragging about her ability to fire a four-star general, we’ve passed into the realm of the absurd.”
Loomer has gone from incendiary far-right provocateur to informal Trump adviser and loyalty enforcer, digging through the backgrounds of political officials in search of insufficient fealty to the MAGA cause and using social media to scorch her targets. Last year Loomer’s accusations appeared to trigger the dismissal of General Timothy Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency.
Ticktin’s style is considerably more mild-mannered, and he claims that the changes he’s pushing, including banning voting machines and mail-in ballots, wouldn’t be all that disruptive or difficult to implement. “We already have paper ballots,” he says. “The main change is the ballots would be hand-counted in public. If we don’t, the machines take over, and the machines can determine the outcome of the election. From a Democrat point of view, they’re gonna want the machines.”
:{:{Ticktin, in the wake of the 2008 subprime collapse, handled major mortgage-fraud cases, and he has won a settlement for a family whose mortally injured son’s organs were harvested without proper permission. He is currently representing Tina Peters, the former Colorado county clerk who was convicted on criminal charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, and has represented several January 6 participants, including Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader, in their bids to receive full pardons for their roles in the attack on the Capitol.}:
“Donald Trump won the 2020 election,” Ticktin says. “I mean, Donald Trump obtained more legitimate votes and should have won.” What about all the investigations and lawsuits that turned up no meaningful fraud? “Some of them were corrupt,” he says. “But most of them, nobody ever looked at the evidence. It was a question of standing. We know much more now than we knew then.”}:
Ticktin has also had his law license suspended twice for conflicts of interest, and the biography on his firm’s site claims the film Philadelphia was originally going to be called Miami, with its story inspired by a client of Ticktin’s. “That’s insane,” says Ron Nyswaner, the Philadelphia screenwriter. “Among the many, many lies we get from Trump and his people, that’s one of them.” (Ticktin says the reference was to a possible unrelated production.) The firm’s site also has a link to “Peter’s Poems,” including “The Toronto Subway System” and “The Hamburger” (“That special sauce is what I dread / Like heroin, it lifts its addictive head”).
The Constitution, Ticktin admits, leaves election logistics to the states. So last year he created an “outline” for an executive order justifying presidential intervention because of what he believes are foreign threats to the electoral system. More recently, a 17-page draft executive order filling in Ticktin’s framework has circulated in conservative circles; it ties together everything from the Defense Production Act to a law related to federal holidays. Ticktin claims he does not know who wrote the longer document. “It might have been Jerome Corsi,” he says.
Corsi, who aggressively promoted doubts about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, says it wasn’t him and he doesn’t know who wrote the draft either, though he calls Ticktin “instrumental” in the larger effort. Whoever the authors might be, Corsi agrees with the draft order’s aims, and says the necessity of a Trump election takeover will soon become clearer, as administration investigations uncover new “hard evidence” of voter fraud in Arizona and Georgia. “Donald Trump has said repeatedly in the second term that one of his goals is to prove the 2020 election was stolen,” Corsi says. “I’ve known Donald Trump for over 40 years...he’s not going to let the midterms be run with all these things in place to create more fraud.”
“This draft executive order rewrites the laws of 50 states and creates brand-new laws with no input from Congress or the states it would affect,” says Devon Ombres, the senior director for courts and legal policy at the Center for American Progress. “The laws it cites don’t give the president the authority to do these things.”
Trump typically cares little for legal niceties. His style is to push boundaries until someone stops him—if they stop him. And actually imposing an executive order might not even be necessary to alter the midterm dynamics. Simply floating the idea of extreme measures might serve the purpose of making less extreme interference—like new voter ID laws and restrictions on mail-in ballots—seem downright tolerable. Increased chatter about foreign interference could also help undermine the credibility of the midterm results. Polling in advance of the 2024 presidential election found a majority of voters were already worried about possible election interference by Russia and China.
One irony is that federal mechanisms to thwart interference were beefed up during Trump’s first term, only to be dismantled during his second. One side effect is that a presidential takeover of elections—an idea long considered outlandish—may now sound more plausible. “We’ve seen this over and over again, the mainstreaming of radical ideas,” says Charlie Sykes, the conservative commentator and an avowed Never Trumper. “Back in 2020, after the election, people were saying the vice president can overturn the Electoral College on January 6. And I rolled my eyes. You know what happened.”
Chris Smith is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He is the best-selling author of The Daily Show (the Book) and Till the End (with CC Sabathia). Smith joined VF after covering politics, entertainment, sports, and crime for New York magazine. Follow him on Twitter. ... Read More
:
The Humiliation of Tulsi Gabbard
---
[### How an election conspiracy theorist has Trump's ear on ...
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › mar › trump-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/27/trump-voting-election-conspiracy-midterms)
Mar 27, 2026 — Peter Ticktin, a Florida lawyer, is promoting a legally dubious plan experts say could sharply restrict voting rights.
[### At Summit, Election Deniers Press for Trump to Take Over ...
ProPublica
https://www.propublica.org › Archive](https://www.propublica.org/article/election-denier-summit-trump-midterms)
Feb 28, 2026 — The meeting's participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, ...
[### Trump officials attended a summit of election deniers who ...
Arizona Mirror
https://azmirror.com › 2026/03/02 › trump-officials-att...](https://azmirror.com/2026/03/02/trump-officials-attended-a-summit-of-election-deniers-who-want-to-take-over-the-midterms/)
Mar 2, 2026 — Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump's ...
[### The Dubious Legality of Trump Allies' Draft EO
Lawfare
https://www.lawfaremedia.org › article › in-case-of-eme...](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/in-case-of-emergency--the-dubious-legality-of-trump-allies-draft-eo)
Mar 12, 2026 — Conservative activists say that declaring a national emergency would allow Trump to assert sweeping authority over elections. They're wrong.
[### 2 Trump-tied lawyers step into 2020 Michigan election cases
The Detroit News
https://www.detroitnews.com › politics › 2025/07/11 › l...](https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/11/lawyer-who-challenged-2020-election-now-working-on-michigan-case/84527145007/)
Jul 11, 2025 — Kurt Olsen, a Washington, D.C., attorney, appeared Friday in a Hillsdale County courtroom on behalf of Oakland County lawyer Stefanie ...
[### MAGA lawyer advises Trump to take over the midterms
Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com › midterms-2676267622](https://www.rawstory.com/midterms-2676267622/)
Mar 17, 2026 — Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old South Florida lawyer and Donald Trump's former New York Military Academy classmate, has advised the president ...
Missing: ATTORNEY | Show results with: ATTORNEY
[### Inside the Battle at DoJ to Get Trump What He Wants
New York Magazine
https://nymag.com › intelligencer › article › donald-tru...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-doj-justice-department-revenge-political-prosecution.html)
Apr 6, 2026 — Bondi was fired because she couldn't arrest Trump's enemies, even as the DoJ has been turned into his own political prosecution team.
[### Peter Ticktin (561) 232-2222 PT@LegalBrains.com Fox News
https://static.foxnews.com › tina_peters_letter](https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2025/12/tina_peters_letter.pdf)
Dec 7, 2025 — Moreover,. Clerk Peters was required to preserve the evidence of the election for 22 months pursuant to federal law 52 U.S.C. § 20701. Clerk ...Read more
9 pages
[### White House Hires 'Stop the Steal' Lawyer to Investigate ...
WSJ
https://www.wsj.com › Politics › Elections](https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/white-house-hires-stop-the-steal-lawyer-to-investigate-2020-election-claims-6395d322)
Oct 17, 2025 — Attorney Kurt Olsen in Maricopa County Superior Court, in Arizona, for a challenge to the results of the 2022 election for governor.Read more
Missing: TICKTIN | Show results with: TICKTIN
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MOJO 3 26
These Far-Right Conspiracists Are Pushing Trump to Take Control of Voting
Election deniers are lobbying the president to declare a national emergency.
Ari Berman
National Voting Rights CorrespondentBio
On Monday afternoon, as war raged with Iran, President Trump was seemingly preoccupied with more trivial matters. “FREE TINA PETERS!” he wrote on Truth Social, referring to the former Colorado election clerk who’s serving a nine-year sentence for giving election conspiracists access to sensitive voting equipment.
While it might seem odd for Trump to be posting about Peters as bombs fell on Tehran, there’s a connection between her and Trump’s orbit—her lawyer, Peter Ticktin, is a former classmate of Trump’s at the New York Military Academy who has represented the president in litigation against his political opponents. And Ticktin is now pushing Trump to declare a national emergency, based on the false claim that China interfered in the 2020 election, so that the president can assume vast new powers over the voting process. After the US invaded Iran, Trump reposted an article from a far right news site claiming that Iran also attempted to interfere in the 2020 and 2024 elections, seemingly tying the military effort to his voting crusade.
The 17-page executive order Ticktin is lobbying Trump to sign would completely upend how Americans vote and have their ballots counted in an unprecedented attempt to usurp powers that the Constitution gives to states and Congress. The order claims that an emergency declaration would allow Trump to unilaterally outlaw mail-in voting for most Americans and seize voting machines in favor of a hand count of all ballots, which would take much longer and be far more error-prone than a regular machine count.
Attorney Peter Ticktin listens during oral arguments for People vs Tina Peters in the Court of Appeals at the Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center in Denver on Jan. 14, 2026.AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post/Pool/AP
That’s not all. The order would require all Americans to re-register to vote in person before the 2026 midterms, effectively voiding all state voter rolls, and force voters to re-verify their status before every election, a wildly impractical measure. It would mandate that all absentee ballots be notarized and restrict mail-in voting to those who have a medical condition or are out-of-town during the election. It would require strict forms of voter ID and proof of citizenship to cast a ballot, which could disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans who lack such documents. “Taken together, the proposal amounts to a radical attempt to reshape the rules of elections ahead of the 2026 midterms,” notes the voting rights group Fair Fight.
“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” Ticktin told the Washington Post. “But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”
Of course, there is no evidence that China interfered in the 2020 election. And the two statutes that Ticktin claims allow Trump to declare a national emergency—the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—in fact give the president no control over the voting process. (The Supreme Court just ruled that the president could not invoke the IEEPA to justify his tariffs.)
“None of the cited authorities delegates the president any power to change voting laws, let alone the wholesale takeover of federal and local elections that the draft EO attempts to enact, even in the face of national emergency—including attempted foreign interference,” says an analysis from the Center for American Progress.
For these reasons, any such executive order would likely be immediately blocked in the courts, much like the last executive order on elections Trump issued last March.
Trump said last week he’s “never heard about” Ticktin’s proposal, but he’s already vowed to issue a new executive order on elections. And given his obsession with the 2020 election and calls for Republicans to “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” the allure of attempting to gain dictatorial control over the electoral process, no matter how illegal it is, is sure to appeal to the president.
Some of the sketchiest figures in the far right’s election denial movement are behind this push.
Ticktin, whose friendship with Trump dates back to their time at the military academy in the 1960s, has had a rocky career as a lawyer. He’s been suspended twice from the Florida bar. After the 2020 election, he represented Trump in a sprawling racketeering lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton and Democrats of manufacturing allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit and ordered sanctions against Trump’s lawyers, including Ticktin.
“The rule of law is undermined by the toxic combination of political fundraising with legal fees paid by political action committees, reckless and factually untrue statements by lawyers at rallies and in the media, and efforts to advance a political narrative through lawsuits without factual basis or any cognizable legal theory,” wrote US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks.
“Taken together, the proposal amounts to a radical attempt to reshape the rules of elections ahead of the 2026 midterms.”
Ticktin subsequently went on to seek pardons for election deniers including Peters, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, members of the Proud Boys, and other January 6 insurrectionists. He told Steve Bannon the 101st Airborne should be sent in to free Peters, who was convicted of giving access of 2020 election records to an associate of My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Ticktin has been promoting the proposed executive order since last April, including on QAnon-affiliated talk shows. “If President Trump can’t call a national election emergency, then we will lose our country,” he told QNewsPatriot in January. Ticktin said the right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi has also “been very involved” in the effort. Corsi has been circulating a new draft since the summer alleging that Trump could invoke emergency powers because of alleged foreign intervention in the 2020 election.
Corsi was the driving force behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry’s military record in 2004 and the birtherism conspiracy against Barack Obama, which Trump amplified. Corsi was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller for allegedly acting as a conduit between Trump adviser Roger Stone and WikiLeaks as part of the effort to leak emails from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Corsi falsely claimed the emails were leaked by murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich.
The work of these fringe characters has been amplified by outside advisers closer to the president. Cleta Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer who helped the president attempt to overturn the 2020 election, said on a podcast in September that she believed “the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.” Bannon has repeatedly promoted the national emergency scenario on his radio show in recent days.
In December 2020, the likes of Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Patrick Byrne went to the White House to urge Trump to order the military to seize state voting machines. Trump was talked off the ledge by his advisers, but now says he regrets not doing so.
Whereas the craziest schemes hatched by election deniers were rejected by Trump’s aides in 2020, today those very election deniers hold prominent positions in the administration and are plotting from the inside. Recently, six administration aides took part in a gathering hosted by Flynn where attendees called on Trump to declare a national emergency. “At some point,” Byrne, the ex-CEO of Overstock.com, said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”
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an 3 26
As allies of President Donald Trump are rumored to be urging him to issue an executive order seizing control of elections ahead of the midterm elections, Arizona’s top attorney and election administrator both say doing so would be blatantly unconstitutional and unlikely to happen.
“No president has the constitutional authority to ‘take control’ of elections,” Attorney General Kris Mayes told the Arizona Mirror in a statement. “Elections in this country are administered by states. It is a deliberate feature of our constitutional system designed to prevent the federal government from seizing power over how Americans choose their leaders.”
On Friday, the Washington Post reported that a proposed executive order, written and supported by conspiracy theorists, has been passed around the White House with the goal of Trump formally issuing it. It would declare an emergency over alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden, and use that as the basis to wrest control of elections from states and make sweeping changes to how Americans register to vote and cast their ballots, and how those votes are then counted.
Mayes said the entire exercise is based on fanciful claims of election fraud that are not backed by any evidence, many of which were rejected by the courts in 2020.
“Arizona’s 2020 election results were investigated, audited, litigated, and certified, even by members of the president’s own party,” Mayes added. “There is nothing to relitigate, and debunked conspiracy theories are not a legal basis for seizing control of American elections.”
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said in a statement to the Mirror that his main concern is focusing on elections in Arizona, not Trump’s actions.
“I don’t have time to be distracted by noise from Washington DC. IF a new (executive order) is forthcoming, and it purports to violate the Constitution like the last one, we will challenge it in Court,” Fontes said. “For now, local and state elections officials in Arizona will stay focused on the task at hand: continuing to provide high quality elections for our voters, as we’ve done for decades.”
The draft executive order that is being shopped to the Trump administration was published by Democracy Docket, a digital news site about elections, and is said to be written by Peter Ticktin, a Trump ally and Florida-based lawyer who represents former Mesa County clerk and election denier Tina Peters.
When asked about the order by reporters on Friday morning, Trump said he had “never heard of it.”
The proposed executive order, an earlier version of which was published in April 2025 by a group led by Trump ally and election denier Cleta Mitchell, includes a number of proposals that have been on the wishlists of election conspiracy theorists for years.
It would require every voter to re-register in 2026; eliminate the use of ballot tabulation machines and force every ballot to be counted by hand; allow anyone to challenge the eligibility of voters; require all races be counted by midnight on Election Day; and create a national voter registration database.
The proposal also would have each ballot require a unique identifier, and each voter would need a unique PIN, which some have noted would erase the secret ballot requirement by Arizona law.
“First Trump said he’d impose new voting rules ‘whether approved by Congress or not’ and now extremists are pushing him to use emergency powers to control our elections,” U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly said on X. “That’s not how things work in our country, and a federal takeover of our elections violates our Constitution and the law. The American people will not stand by and let their voting rights be undermined.”
Trump and his allies have been pushing for the passage of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, more commonly known as the SAVE Act, with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem making a stop in Arizona to stump for it and fueling more baseless election conspiracy theories along the way.
She called Arizona’s elections an “absolute disaster” and made the false claim that there is widespread voter fraud by illegal immigrants. But when pressed by reporters to provide examples, Noem could not provide even a single one.
The proposed executive order is based around many of those baseless conspiracy theories, alluding to interference by foreign actors in machines and claims of widespread noncitizen voting, both of which have been found to be baseless.
The SAVE Act has passed out of the U.S. House of Representatives but faces a roadblock in the U.S. Senate because the GOP majority doesn’t have enough support to get around the filibuster. Trump has said that if it does not pass, he would look for alternative ways to enact it.
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MMA
Right-wing figures and Trump allies are calling for Trump to declare a “national emergency” to prevent supposed election fraud
Jerome Corsi has claimed he’s been involved in drafting an executive order “to be implemented for the 2026 elections”
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 10/28/25
The New York Times recently reported that a Department of Homeland Security official focused on “election integrity,” appointed by President Donald Trump, has proposed that Trump declare a “national emergency” to “justify dictating new rules to state and local governments” related to voting and elections.
The call for a “national emergency” declaration, which Department of Homeland Security official Heather Honey made a few months ahead of her appointment, has also recently been reiterated by right-wing figures and Trump allies known for pushing false claims of widespread election fraud. In interviews and on social media, some of these figures have suggested that Trump use “plenary authority” or claimed to be “encouraging” Trump to declare a national emergency “to make sure that the elections in 2026 are secure.” One of those figures has even claimed to be involved in efforts to craft a related executive order that would affect voting processes.
- ## Trump has issued and threatened executive orders to enact national election policies
- In March, Trump issued an executive order of dubious legality to mandate prospective voters provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The executive order “calls for the Election Assistance Commission to require people to show government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, and directs state or local officials to record and verify the information,” along with “requir[ing] states to count ballots by Election Day.” Legal experts have cast doubt on the executive order’s legality, and a federal judge in June blocked most of the key provisions of the order, writing in a decision that “the Constitution does not grant the president any specific powers over elections.” In August, Trump called for voter ID for “every single vote,” claiming, “I Will Be Doing An Executive Order To That End!!!” The New York Times, [3/25/25, 3/26/25, 6/13/25, 8/31/25]
- ## Trump official previously suggested Trump can declare a “national emergency” to implement the administration’s preferred election policies nationally
- In March, Heather Honey, now DHS’ deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, reportedly “suggested that the new administration could declare a ‘national emergency’ and justify dictating new rules to state and local governments” related to voting and elections. The New York Times reported that during a “call with right-wing activists in March,” Honey suggested a national emergency “could be based on an ‘actual investigation’ of the 2020 election if it showed there had been a ‘manipulation’ of the vote.” “Therefore,” she argued, “we have some additional powers that don’t exist right now” and “can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.” The New York Times, [10/22/25]
- Honey is one of “multiple proponents” of Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims who The New York Times reports Trump elevated “into high-level administration jobs.” Prior to Honey's appointment to DHS in August, she was “a leader” in the “right-wing election activist movement that emerged” after Trump “falsely claimed that his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread fraud.” According to the Times, Honey “echo[ed] rhetoric that has infused” that movement during a call in September with state election officials. The New York Times, [10/22/25]
- ## Right-wing figures and Trump allies have called for Trump to issue a national emergency declaration to enforce his preferred election policies
- At an event for right-wing website The Gateway Pundit, former Trump attorney Peter Ticktin said he “wouldn’t be very surprised” if there’s “an emergency called” before the next election, claiming that “it's necessary.” Ticktin, an attorney with a history of spreading election fraud claims, said at a conference organized by The Gateway Pundit, “I wouldn’t be very surprised if we find out before the next election that there’s kind of, be an emergency called,” with which “we’re going to be able to turn the tide.” Ticktin also said, “I don’t have it on good authority that this is going to be done, but a number of people are urging it because it’s necessary.” Media Matters, [7/9/19, 6/16/22, 7/15/22; The Gateway Pundit’s Vindicated conference, 8/23/25]
- :{:{Podcaster Joe Oltmann, who refused to provide evidence in court of his claims that the 2020 election was rigged, said that Trump’s election-related executive orders “are permissible in states of national and foreign emergencies.” Responding to a social media post suggesting Trump’s proposed voter ID executive order violated the Constitution, Oltmann wrote, “Supremacy clause, and state of emergency. EO are permissible in states of national and foreign emergencies.” Colorado Public Radio, [7/31/25; USA Today, 9/5/24; Twitter/X, 8/31/25]}:
- Conrad Reynolds, who is part of an initiative to get rid of voting machines, said, “We are encouraging the president to declare a national emergency right now on this issue.” According to Little Rock Public Radio, Reynolds “thinks Arkansas voting machines could be flipping votes” and runs an organization focused on “getting rid of voting machines” in favor of paper ballots. He was charged with electioneering over the issue. While appearing on a podcast, Reynolds said: “We have a national emergency. That's what this is. And we are encouraging the president to declare a national emergency right now on this issue.” He added that “if we don’t get this right, I'm telling you the midterms are not going to be good, and we need to fix it right now.” Little Rock Public Radio, [11/4/24, 10/10/25; The State of Freedom, 9/16/25]
- During a call on “election integrity” on a Florida GOP official’s podcast, VoterGA’s Garland Favorito said that Trump “can execute his National Emergency Act powers” to supposedly protect elections. CNN reported that Favorito has “a long history of promoting debunked conspiracy theories” and a “penchant for pushing election misinformation.” During the podcast, Favorito said that Trump could “execute his National Emergency Act powers” in order to ensure that election systems “comply” with federal law, adding, “I believe that he’ll do that.” CNN, [10/9/24; ProPublica, 10/16/24; Stern American, 9/18/25]
- Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn during a podcast appearance: “The only way that we’re going to have a fair federal election is if” Trump “declares ... some sort of a national emergency.” Flynn, who urged Trump after the 2020 election to seize voter machines and who Trump has since appointed to the board of visitors for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, said on a podcast that “there’s all kinds of fraudulent activity and behavior” in elections, meaning that “the only way that we’re going to have a fair federal election is if the president of the United States declares ... some sort of a national emergency and says for federal elections,” there will be “picture ID”, “no mail-in ballots,” and “on election day, we do ... basically a paper count.” The New York Times, [1/31/22; Reuters, 3/17/25; Conversations in Energy with Stuart Turley, 10/14/25]
- David Clements, who has spread claims about election fraud, said that Trump should use “plenary authority” to stop “a digital invasion and a digital rebellion taking place.” Lawfare reported in 2024 that Clements had “criss-crossed the country to evangelize about purported election fraud,” and The Washington Post reported in 2022 that he was “traveling the country trying to persuade local leaders to withhold certification of election results.” During an interview on a right-wing YouTube channel, Clements and his wife Erin discussed supposed ways to fix “rigged elections,” with Clements arguing that it’s necessary to “start looking at Title 50, Article 2 power, a national security framework for Trump to really be in a position where he’s not asking. He’s ordering. He’s telling you,” and that “even people like Peter Ticktin … have come to the same conclusion.” Clements added that Trump has to “be able to declare things from a framework of plenary authority, meaning he’s not ... relying on the legislature that’s been captured to come in and codify what he’s saying,” and that he believed Trump was “prepared to do that.” Lawfare, [10/31/24; The Washington Post, 9/8/22; Media Matters, 6/14/23; YouTube, 10/20/25]
- Jerome Corsi, who previously worked for conspiracy theory network Infowars, said that a “national security emergency will allow Donald Trump to make sure that the elections in 2026 are secure even if we have to go to extreme measures and get the military involved.” Corsi also has a long history of producing false research, helped popularize the QAnon conspiracy theory, and was instrumental in pushing the lie that former President Barack Obama has a fake birth certificate. NPR, [3/2/23; Media Matters, 1/8/18, 11/13/18; Stern American, 9/18/25]
- ## Corsi has claimed to be working with Ticktin in the drafting of another Trump executive order based on a “national security emergency” ahead of 2026 elections
- Jerome Corsi has repeatedly claimed that he and Peter Ticktin have been involved in the drafting of a Trump executive order “to be implemented for the 2026 elections.” During appearances on the podcasts Stern American and Nino’s Corner, Corsi claimed that he and Ticktin had been involved with a “17-page draft of an executive order” that would “declare a national security emergency” and includes “steps the states will be required to take in order to make sure the elections are secure.” Corsi has also claimed that Trump “can use his Article 2 powers as commander in chief and have the military run the elections if he had to.” In October, Corsi claimed to have been “briefed” that the order was “expected to come down the next couple of months and to be implemented for the 2026 elections.” *Stern American*, [7/14/25, 9/18/25, 10/8/25; Rumble, 9/2/25, 10/22/25, 10/22/25]
- Corsi said the executive order would be “based on our research” and would target voter rolls, mandate voter ID, and require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Corsi said the order would “stop using all existing voter rolls, stop using all existing computers that handle those voting rolls, that we go to voter ID and proof of citizenship for new registrations, and that that proof of citizenship demand the ability to make sure someone is a citizen before they be allowed to vote.” *Stern American*, [7/14/25, 7/30/25]
- Ticktin has also acknowledged Corsi’s involvement in targeting voter rolls.Ticktin, in a call on “election integrity” on the Stern American podcast, said of proving that the “voter rolls have been corrupted”: “We’ve got certain people. There’s Jerome Corsi, who’s been very involved in this. We’ve got Andrew Paquette, who really was the one that was on the forefront of all of this.” *Stern American*, [9/18/25]
//
07/15/22 12:39 PM EDT
08/25/25 7:06 PM EDT
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