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Clarification, Oct. 14: This story has been updated to clarify what Cleta Mitchell wants the Commerce Department to do and her role in Trump’s 2020 call to the Georgia secretary of state.

Since being released early from prison in June, former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters has been granted extraordinary access to the halls of power in Washington.

Peters said she has traveled to Washington seven times, visited the White House at least twice, and met with senior officials at the Justice and Commerce departments — remarkable access for someone on parole after a 2024 felony conviction for tampering with voting machines in an attempt to show that the 2020 election was rigged against President Donald Trump.

She’s a high-profile example of a group of Trump supporters and conservative activists trying to lay out a roadmap for the president to follow. They are urging him to take more extreme steps to try and influence the outcome of an election that many polls suggest could end Republican control of Congress. But as the election closes in, the activists are now voicing increasing concerns that the president and his administration aren’t going to act on their ideas.

Peters isn’t shy about what she wants. The 71-year-old activist is pushing the Trump administration to use emergency powers before the November election to scrutinize voting machines across America, though that’s something most experts and lawyers say it can’t legally do.

“A lot of people would say that we just need to go rogue and declare this radical emergency and we need to shut everything down,” Peters said last week on an election activist livestream on Rumble. “The encouraging part is that there are already orders and laws in place that allow them to do what they need to do.”

Other conservative activists pushing for changes to election administration include:

• Cleta Mitchell, head of the Election Integrity Network and a Trump ally, who is pushing the Commerce Department to require a partial hand count of the election results because of potential national security risks with voting machines.
• Mike Lindell, a longtime Trump ally who has spent years promoting claims that voting machines were used to manipulate U.S. elections, who wants Trump to declare a national emergency and prevent the use of electronic voting machines in November.
• Peter Ticktin, a Florida attorney representing Peters and longtime Trump friend, who said Trump might have to declare martial law if the election results are in question.
• Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally and former White House chief strategist who hosts the influential right-wing podcast War Room, who has repeatedly urged Trump to use emergency powers to require voter identification at the polls and send ICE agents to polling places.
• James Mills, head of the Georgia State Election Board, who sent a letter last week urging the Trump administration to compel his state to make election software updates before the November election.

A wide array of lawyers, voting rights groups, civil rights leaders, and Democrats have denounced the ideas as an unconstitutional attack on the nation’s electoral process. But such criticisms haven’t deterred Trump from trying to advance a variety of proposals to impose more federal control over elections.

Federal courts have blocked Trump from advancing key pillars of two executive orders that would have transformed the U.S. Postal Service into a ballot regulation agency, eliminated grace periods for ballots arriving after Election Day, and required all people to provide documented proof of citizenship to register to vote.

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With most of his efforts at election oversight blocked, Trump has left open the possibility he might heed the calls of supporters urging him to take drastic action before November.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK?” Trump said in an August interview with Wayne Allyn Root on Real America’s Voice, responding to a question about declaring a national security emergency as a way to assert more authority over elections. “I’ll leave it at that.”

‘Sowing confusion, chaos and distrust’

The Trump administration has laid out an Election Day plan that includes dispatching 1,000 election monitors to look for any problems in key states, establishing FBI command posts across the nation, and military monitoring of potential cyber attacks from hostile nations. Pentagon officials have said they have no plans to send armed forces to polling places on Election Day. But the Trump administration has stopped short of foreclosing the possibility that ICE or armed federal agents could operate near or in polling places, a move that could cross legal lines.

Sean Morales-Doyle, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, said federal laws and precedent make it extremely unlikely that Trump would be able to take any meaningful steps to seize voting machines before the election. And that may not be the ultimate goal, he said.

“The point of this concerted campaign to undermine our elections from this administration is really not about changing the rules, because even they know the president lacks the authority,” said Morales-Doyle. “It is about sowing confusion, chaos and distrust and undermining public trust in our elections.”

Peters appears to be the person who has had the greatest access to Trump administration officials in recent months. Trump had lunch at the White House with Peters and Ticktin in late June, just four weeks after Peters was released from state prison. Peters returned for a second visit last week, Ticktin told Votebeat.

Mitchell and Peters have focused part of their efforts on persuading the Commerce Department to use what they said is existing authority over voting machines, which a letter from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said introduces a national security risk because they contain parts from other nations, including China.

Mitchell argues that a national emergency declaration that Trump declared in 2019 gives the Commerce Department the power to compel election officials to conduct a partial hand count before certification. Earlier this year, Justice Department official Keith Olsen reportedly tried to get the Commerce Department to classify voting machine components as national security threats, which could lead to them being banned from use in the U.S. But investigators found no evidence to support the claims, Reuters reported, and the idea was scrapped.

Mitchell, in an interview with Votebeat, expressed frustration that the Trump administration has not placed enough importance on the concerns and blamed people working for the president for not doing enough to address election issues.

“I can call the president anytime I want to — and I have,” said Mitchell, who declined to say when she last spoke to Trump. “I told the president this: I wish that the people in your administration knew or cared as much about election integrity as you do.”

Neither the Commerce Department nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

Mitchell said she signs every message to administration officials with the same sign-off: Tick-tock.

That’s the same message Ticktin said he has been trying to convey.

“We are running out of time,” said Ticktin, who characterized the threat from Chinese-made parts in voting machines as akin to an act of war.

“This is getting serious enough and critical enough that it might even require, at some point, martial law,” said Ticktin. “People say: ‘Ticktin’s crazy.’ If I’m not crazy and what I am saying is true that China is attacking us in some way, well then we’re really in a state of belligerence with China and, sooner or later, it’s going to be too late to change things in a peaceful way.”

Ticktin suggested that federal forces could help seize voting machines in places where the count is in question, and potentially hand-count ballots.

Ticktin’s call represents the most extreme — and most unlikely — idea being pushed by election skeptics.

Mitchell, Peters, and others have been urging the administration to take more strategic steps to address their concerns.

A focal point for the group is Georgia, where Mills surprised members of the state elections board by sending off a letter urging the Trump administration to order major changes to the state’s voting equipment before the November election.

The letter asked the Justice Department to force state and county officials to install software updates before the November election. It also asked the Justice Department to prevent QR-code-based tabulation in Georgia and require Georgia to end its use of the codes in six months. But installing new software would require time, money and resources — all of which are in short supply for Georgia in the weeks leading up to the election.

Trump has long focused his ire on Georgia, where he lost the 2020 presidential election by fewer than 12,000 votes — less than 1% of the ballots cast. Mitchell joined Trump on a call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after the election where the president pressed him to “find” him more than 11,000 votes, enough to change the outcome. Earlier this year, the FBI searched Fulton County’s election hub and seized more than 650 boxes, including ballots, from the 2020 election. The results in Georgia this fall will be pivotal to partisan control of the U.S. Senate.

Beyond Georgia, others like Bannon and Lindell keep pressing the president to issue a new national security declaration to prevent the use of electronic voting machines to tally votes at all.

“The president needs to completely declare a national emergency,” Lindell said. “The president can just make a national argument and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to go paper ballots, hand counting.’”

But making such a declaration wouldn’t allow Trump to ban voting machines or require states to count all ballots by hand. The Constitution grants the president limited control over elections, which are usually handled by state and local officials with direction from Congress.

At the end of the day, said Morales-Doyle, the most important thing voters can do is make plans to cast their ballots in ways they feel safe and secure.

“At this moment, when democracy has come under such unprecedented and pointed attacks, it is more important than ever that people invest in democracy and that do so in defiance of all this,” he said.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The post From martial law to banning voting machines, election skeptics urge Trump to take extreme action appeared first on Salon.com.

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!

With just weeks until the midterm elections, the Trump administration is, unsurprisingly, still hard at work seeking evidence of widespread non-citizen voting. And it is still not finding it. 

We got new details this week about exactly what the administration has been up to thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Over the past year, ICE has reviewed millions of records and investigated hundreds of nonprofits suspected of helping noncitizens register to vote, according to internal records that were obtained by the nonprofit Democracy Forward. “The information revealed in the documents should concern all Americans and is further evidence of an alarming attempt by the executive branch to undermine our elections,” Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.

The records note that these investigations were, in part, meant “to identify specific organizations that may be predatory in nature, particularly those suspected of illegal registration and voter encouragement.”

For years now, the Trump administration has been pushing the false narrative that non-citizens are voting en masse for Democrats. There is no evidence of any kind to suggest this is the case. The lack of evidence, however, has not stopped President Trump from pushing forward this lie on a near-daily basis and using the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to investigate the conspiracy theory. It functions as another way to drum up fear and distrust in our election system just in time for the midterm elections. 

The newly released records reveal that “48.4 million records were obtained by [DHS deputy assistant secretary for election integrity] Heather Honey through independent sources of information”  as part of what is described as a “strategic line of effort” to investigate instances of supposed non-citizen voting. DHS Investigators also looked at 50.6 million records from the DOJ, the documents say; those records, CNN reported, could include unredacted voter data from some states. 

The records also indicate that Homeland Security Investigation (HSI), an investigative unit within ICE, watched recent primary elections “to identify emerging trends, vulnerabilities, or indicators that may impact election integrity.”

“DHS has been incredibly transparent about the acquisition and the analysis of publicly available voter files conducted by the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate of USCIS,” the Department told CNN. “DHS and DOJ are laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of US citizens.”

The documents also reveal that HSI considered deploying undercover agents to investigate certain non-profits that the administration suspected of having helped register non-citizens to vote, and named New Jersey and Pennsylvania as specific “areas of focus.”

The records indicate that HSI specifically investigated a branch of CAIR, The Council on American-Islamic Relations in Pennsylvania as well as the clothing company Zumiez, which were both, per the documents, “flagged for further investigation.”

As always, we have a lot more to unpack this week, so let’s dig in. 

Reminder: There are Hundreds of Election Deniers Running for Office

There are by one tally a staggering 197 election deniers on the midterm ballots next month, according to newly released research from States United Action.

We have previously highlighted some of the most prominent election deniers hoping to win elections this fall. For example, Jim Marchant is a big time election conspiracy theorist and is currently running as the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Nevada. Marchant, who has consistently repeated lies about the 2020 election for years now, also won the GOP nomination for secretary of state back in 2022, and was the founding member of America First Secretary of State Coalition. The coalition was a group of election deniers all running for secretary of state positions on 2020 election conspiracy theory platforms, intent on somehow overturning the results of that election. Marchant lost to Democrat Cisco Aguilar in 2022, and, at the time, told NBC News that if he was secretary of state he would not have certified the 2020 election results in favor of Joe Biden. 

Marchant, however, is just one of many election deniers on the ballot. More specifically, and most concerning, there are, per States United Action, at least 33 election deniers in 21 states on the ballot running for positions that would play a role in overseeing elections, including 17 election deniers running for governor, 7 election deniers running for secretary of state, and nine election deniers running for attorney general. 

“Our 2026 research shows how deeply embedded the election denial movement is, even as fewer Election Deniers are running for office than we saw in 2022,” Kelly Rader, Research Director at States United Action, said in a press release this week. “The election denial movement is showing up across every facet of our democracy — from the ballot box to the White House.” 

Todd Blanche is Doubling Down on DOJ’s Decision to Send 1,000 Election Monitors to the Polls

Attorney General Todd Blanche is defending the DOJ’s decision to send 1,000 election monitors to various polling locations throughout the country for the midterm elections. 

To jog your memory, we noted back in August that Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon confirmed to Bloomberg News that the DOJ planned to dispatch close to 1,000 election monitors next month as a way to, as the DOJ claimed, secure the midterm elections. 

State and local election administrators have a different concern: that this onslaught of federal election monitors will be intimidating for voters. 

Dhillon has sought to play it down as business-as-usual. “The United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has sent monitors to election hot spots, polling places to increase voter confidence to troubleshoot problems and we are doing that now. We just did it in the primary,” Dhillon said at the time. “We’re going to do it to the tune of approximately a thousand election monitors in the November election, and this is just something that DOJ does.”

More recently, on Sunday, Blanche told Fox News’s Shannon Bream that the administration’s decision to send federal election monitors to polling sites is simply to make sure “that federal law is being enforced appropriately.”

“They’re not going to Republican states, they’re not going to Democrat states,” Blanche said.”They are going to every state to make sure our elections are carried out legally, fairly and appropriately.” 

Blanche also shut down speculation that armed federal agents would be deployed at polling stations, calling the claim “completely false.”

Relatedly, the NAACP filed a federal lawsuit against Dhillon only days before Blanche’s comments, demanding records about the DOJ’s plan to deploy 1,000 election monitors for the midterm elections.

“This unprecedented deployment of federal officials stands to jeopardize the election and interfere with the right of voters to participate in the election free from intimidation,” the lawsuit reads. “Courts have recognized that unnecessary law enforcement and government presence at polling sites can cause fear, create confusion, impose burdens on election officials, and have a chilling or coercive effect on the electorate.”

In Other Election News

CNN: Inside Democrats’ efforts to secure Election Day and respond to fears of Trump interference

ABC News:Trump sows doubt about mail-in voting while encouraging it, as midterms approach 

Colorado Newsline: Tina Peters met with Trump to discuss election plans, former Trump administration attorney says

‘I Would Underscore the Seriousness Of the Violation Here’

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s election meddling scheme was declared unlawful by the California Supreme Court, which just issued unanimous decisions in two cases focused on Bianco’s seizure of 650,000 ballots in California this spring.

I’ll unpack Bianco’s extremist background and ties to the far-right constitutional sheriff’s movement a bit more below, but, crucially, Bianco seized ballots in April that were cast in the state’s 2025 special election — when voters approved Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to conduct redistricting mid-cycle. As you’ll recall, Newsom put forward Proposition 50 in an attempt to offset the damage of President Trump’s nationwide gerrymandering crusade.

Prop 50 was placed on the California ballot specifically in response to Texas’ redrawing of its congressional district lines, which is expected to net five seats for Republicans in the U.S. House in the midterms. Newsom was one of several Democratic officials across the U.S. who worked to combat Trump’s gerrymandering blitz, a bullying campaign Trump launched last summer in an attempt to pressure Republican-controlled state legislatures nationwide to redraw their district maps mid-cycle to help Republicans hold the House this fall. Texas was the first to act on Trump’s demands, followed by Missouri, North Carolina, Florida and others. Enough Republicans in Indiana’s state Senate bucked Trump to quash the effort there. Trump endorsed primary challengers for those who refused to bend the knee, and most of those who stood up to Trump lost their primary elections in May.

Anyway, back to California and the MAGA sheriff seizing ballots. California voters approved Prop 50 — which amended the state constitution so that state officials could, temporarily, bypass normal protocol for redistricting and approved new maps that gave Democrats an additional five seats in the House — with a 64% vote in November 2025. Shortly thereafter, Bianco seized the ballots from election officials as part of what he claimed to be an investigation into complaints from Riverside County activists (i.e. election conspiracy theorists) who claimed the vote count did not match the number of ballots election officials received.

The California Supreme Court ordered Bianco to halt his investigation back in April while the case challenging his seizure played out in court. The state’s highest court ruled on Thursday that Bianco did not have the authority to take the ballots, issuing unanimous decisions in two separate cases brought against the sheriff — one by Riverside County voters and another by California Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta. The Supreme Court declared that Bianco’s actions threatened election integrity in the state of California. An excerpt from the ruling in the case brought by voters:

We hold that the seizure of the ballots was unlawful. California law long has recognized that voted ballots require special care and handling to safeguard them from alteration or tampering. Consistent with this principle, the Elections Code narrowly limits the circumstances in which a court may order the production of ballots for inspection, and even in those narrow circumstances, requires that ballots remain in the physical custody of the responsible elections official.

“I would underscore the seriousness of the violation here. This is not a case involving a few documents,” Associate Justice Goodwin H. Liu said in a concurrent opinion. “It involves the unlawful removal and handling by armed deputies of over 1,000 boxes of documents — and not just any documents, but the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.”