Lawyers in support of Donald Trump are pushing the president to declare a national emergency to expand his powers ahead of the midterm elections, according to new reports.
Since before Trump lost to former President Joe Biden in 2020, he has been sowing doubt into America’s electoral process. The president has never admitted defeat to Biden, claiming without evidence the election was fraught with voter fraud. Ahead of this year’s midterm elections, Trump is again questioning election integrity, pushing for vast voter ID requirements and a ban on mail-in ballots.
The pro-Trump activists’ draft executive order will claim China interfered in the 2020 election to propel a national emergency declaration to give the president unprecedented power over voting, The Washington Post first reported.
The activists say they are coordinating with the White House on the draft executive order, per The Washington Post. A White House official told The Independent that staffers regularly communicate with advocates who want to share policy ideas with Trump but discussing what policies the president may announce is speculative.
A National Intelligence Council report on foreign threats to the 2020 election was declassified in March 2021. The report found China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election.”
China didn’t think either Trump or Biden winning was “advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling,” according to U.S. intelligence. But the report did find that China took “some steps to try to undermine former President Trump’s reelection.”
Peter Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who had represented Trump in a later dismissed 2022 lawsuit about claims his campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, is pushing the draft executive order.
“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,” he added.
ABC News reported the draft executive order would require voter ID and hand-counted ballots. Mail-in ballots would also be prohibited by the order, according to the outlet.
Trump has already reviewed the 17-page document, per ABC News’ sources. The pro-Trump lawyers said they expect the draft executive order to be incorporated into an executive order that the administration already plans to issue, the outlet reported.
Trump warned earlier this month that he will present an “irrefutable” legal argument for a voter ID mandate “in the very near future.”
“There will be Voter ID for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel,” the president wrote on Truth Social February 13.
The Republican-led House of Representatives recently passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, also known as the SAVE Act. The bill requires Americans to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and present photo ID when voting in federal elections. The SAVE Act is being held up in the Senate.
Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, argued there is no national emergency concerning America’s electoral process.
“We’ve been raising the alarm for weeks about Trump’s attacks on our elections — now we’re getting details about how they might be planning to do it,” Warner wrote on Facebook in response to The Washington Post’s reporting. “Let’s be clear: there’s no national emergency. This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters.”
Issue One, a group aimed at bolstering U.S. elections, said Trump doesn’t have “legal authority” to “unilaterally” change the electoral process.
“The proposed executive order reported in The Washington Post is straight out of the playbook used by dictators to undermine democratic elections to cement their own unchecked power. If the White House issues this order, Congress must immediately take steps to stop it and protect the Constitution they swore an oath to uphold,” Issue One Policy Director Michael McNulty said in a statement shared with The Independent.
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