Convicted criminal and former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters is pushing a scheme to give the Trump administration control over voting machines. In August, she called on the Department of War “to go in and demand to have these machines in their custody.”

More recently, her lawyer, election denier Peter Ticktin, suggested that Peters’ plan was to “get control over the ballots as soon as the machine spits them through and then do a recount.” And on Oct. 5, according to Trump ally Ed Martin, Peters met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss election security.

We have been here before.

In December 2020, a group of conspiracy theorists sat in the Oval Office arguing that Donald Trump should declare a national emergency and order the secretary of defense to “seize, collect, retain and analyze” voting machines, equipment and electronically stored election information.

The motley crew of election deniers pushing this approach included attorney Sidney Powell, Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. The day before the meeting, Flynn had suggested that the president could invoke martial law and use the military to “rerun” elections in swing states.

More important than who advocated seizing voting equipment was who opposed it. The White House counsel, his deputy and the staff secretary all helped stop Trump from signing the order. So did Attorney General William Barr. Even Rudy Giuliani opposed using the military.

Those guardrails no longer exist.

Trump is now surrounded by yes-men. The White House is staffed with the likes of Stephen Miller. The White House counsel’s office is filled with lawyers ready to do Trump’s bidding.

The Department of Justice is now in the hands of Todd Blanche, whom I have previously described as Trump’s Roy Cohn. The FBI is led by Kash Patel, who wrote a children’s book that portrayed Trump as a benevolent king.

In 2020, the leaders at the Pentagon made clear they would not carry out illegal orders. Pete Hegseth has proven himself willing to do whatever it takes to advance Trump’s wishes. When Sen. Elissa Slotkin asked him whether he would refuse an order from Trump to seize ballots and voting machines in the 2026 election, he dismissed the question as a “gotcha hypothetical.”

Trump has learned from his previous mistakes. Up and down the administration, from the lowest-level staffers to Cabinet officials, everyone has passed the Trump loyalty test. There are no principled public servants in sight.

Nor can we count on Republican state and local election officials to fight back. Yes, any effort by Trump to interfere with voting in states like New York or California would meet stiff resistance. But what about Florida or Texas?

Worse, Trump has made clear that he wishes he had signed that executive order in 2020. In January, he told The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states, though he doubted whether the Guard was “sophisticated enough” to carry out the order.

My fear is that he won’t make that “mistake” again.

Tina Peters’ plan may be the most extreme, but she is not the only one urging Trump to use his office to take control of our elections. And Trump has already tried.

Last year, he issued an executive order requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. Federal courts stopped him, ruling that Trump has no power to rewrite election rules on his own.

In March, he issued a second order directing the U.S. Postal Service to limit who may receive a mail ballot. The courts blocked that as well.

Declaring a national emergency and claiming control over voting machines would be just another step.

Indeed, right-wing lawyer Cleta Mitchell claims he has already taken it. She points to a 2019 executive order in which Trump declared a national emergency over foreign threats to the nation’s communications technology supply chain and handed enforcement to the Commerce Department.

Under that order, Mitchell argues, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick already has the power, and the duty, to act against voting machines that contain foreign-made parts. Recall that Mitchell was on the phone with Trump when he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find votes that did not exist.

If Trump moves forward with this scheme, he will be met with a barrage of lawsuits from lawyers like me. If history is any guide, we will prevail. But at what cost to public confidence and trust?

Make no mistake: Trump wants to rig the midterm elections. If that fails, he will try to subvert the results. And even if all of his efforts are defeated, he will resort to false claims of fraud and incite his loyal supporters.

We saw this play out after 2020. We saw the results on Jan. 6, 2021. We have been living with the consequences ever since.

It is not enough to win at the ballot box. It is not enough to win in court. Voters must insist that when a new Congress is seated, it makes restoring democracy and undoing the harm Trump has caused one of its top priorities.