Anti-voting activists coordinating with White House on blatantly illegal draft emergency order to take control of electi

Anti-voting activists coordinating with White House on blatantly illegal draft emergency order to take control of elections

A draft emergency executive order to declare a national emergency to allow President Donald Trump to take unprecedented control over voting is being circulated by anti-voting activists who said they are in coordination with the White House. Voting rights experts, democracy advocates, and at least one state election chief said Trump doesn’t have the authority to claim such powers — and any attempt would be blatantly unconstitutional.

The draft order — which is said to be based on a conspiracy theory that China interfered with the 2020 election — would allow Trump to unilaterally ban mail-in ballots and voting machines on the basis that they are susceptible to foreign interference. The order comes from MAGA activists who have been coordinating with the White House. One of the advocates for the order is Peter Ticktin, the attorney for Tina Peters, the former GOP Colorado county clerk who is currently serving a nine-year state prison sentence for her role in a 2021 voting system breach, in an attempt to find voter fraud based on election conspiracies.

The Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives states — not the president — sole authority over elections. But in an email to Democracy Docket, Ticktin said that Trump “may invoke emergency powers in response to an election emergency involving foreign interference, provided certain statutory and procedural requirements are met.” Ticktin said those requirements derive from the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEA). “These powers are subject to procedural safeguards and judicial review to ensure compliance with constitutional and statutory limits,” Ticktin added.

Trump could have been referencing the legal argument laid out in the draft emergency order in a social media post earlier this month, where he threatened to bypass Congress to implement voter ID requirements and to ban mail-in voting. “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future,” Trump wrote. He later posted that would “be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.” “What a gift such a clearly unconstitutional executive order would be!,” David Becker, the executive director of Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorney, noted on social media. “Though divorced from legal and factual reality, it would enable the courts to invalidate this power grab well in advance of the election, and confirm the clear limits to [federal] interference in elections.”

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/white-house-circulating-blatantly-illegal-draft-emergency-order-to-take-control-of-elections/