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.
No surprise there:
Ivana Trump once told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that her husband, real-estate mogul Donald Trump, now a leading Republican presidential candidate, kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed.
If he studied Hitler’s speeches then why is he so bad at them? Wasn’t Hitler like one of the best at speeches? Some would say the very best, better than anyone has ever seen.
I’ve met people better than Hitler at speeches. That’s not the only trait that affects whether you go up in power or down. But no less important is that they might have had different desires.
My response was in part meant to be in jest to how trump speaks