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.
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