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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.
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