On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Trump-aligned activists are pitching the president on a draft executive order that would declare an “emergency,” relying on debunked claims of foreign interference in elections, to order a far-right wish list of changes to how elections are run in America.
That list is far-reaching. It would attempt to revolutionize elections just as President Trump and his allies search for ways to reduce the ease of voting in the run-up to the midterms later this year. Voting by mail would be banned, as would electronic voting machines.
The proposal is unlikely to go anywhere in the short term, even if Trump goes forward and signs it as an executive order. It would likely face immediate court challenges, and the Supreme Court would be unlikely to uphold the order, according to Ned Foley, the Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law at The Ohio State University.
“There is little doubt that the Court would hold that, giving existing federal statutes concerning congressional elections, the president has no authority to ‘ban mail ballots and voting machines’ even if the president has a reasonable factual predicate for believing that that those instruments of the electoral process are vulnerable to malicious interference by foreign government,” Foley wrote in response to the Washington Post article.
One of the activists involved with the proposal is a Florida lawyer named Peter Ticktin, who went to school with Trump.
On Friday, a representative of Ticktin’s law firm shared their version of the draft order with Talking Points Memo. The draft shared date, length and other details with the document the Post described.
According to the Post and a subsequent story by ABC News, Trump has reviewed versions of the order. Ticktin told ABC that he has been in touch with key influencers in the election denial universe about it, including Michael Flynn, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.
But asked by reporters about the order Friday, Trump replied, “who told you that?”
Pressed, the president said, “No, I’ve never heard about it.”
Read the proposal here:
