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.”
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.
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.”
