A draft emergency executive order to declare a national emergency to allow President Donald Trump to take unprecedented control over voting is being circulated by anti-voting activists who said they are in coordination with the White House.
Voting rights experts, democracy advocates, and at least one state election chief said Trump doesn’t have the authority to claim such powers — and any attempt would be blatantly unconstitutional.
The draft order — which is said to be based on a conspiracy theory that China interfered with the 2020 election — would allow Trump to unilaterally ban mail-in ballots and voting machines on the basis that they are susceptible to foreign interference.
The order comes from MAGA activists who have been coordinating with the White House. One of the advocates for the order is Peter Ticktin, the attorney for Tina Peters, the former GOP Colorado county clerk who is currently serving a nine-year state prison sentence for her role in a 2021 voting system breach, in an attempt to find voter fraud based on election conspiracies.
The Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives states — not the president — sole authority over elections.
It wasn’t a dig. All those things you mentioned were not straight up authoritarianism, they were in part by the largest group voting group getting their way. That’s what the voters want. It was extremely shitty stuff and I never said it wasn’t. Just because these happened doesn’t mean it was because of authoritarianism. We slowly evolved getting better over time, but now we are regressing. And it will be extremely difficult to vote our way out of it, even when the majority of eligible voters want to. In no time in our Constitutional history has so much power been under one man.
Gee, I wonder if there’s a reason you were taught a construction of authoritarianism that applied to enemies of the US but not the brutal violence and control in the US itself. Andrew Jackson ignored the constitution and courts too, go find out why.
You Muppet.
Andrew Jackson did not have close to the backing from the supreme Court Trump has. They basically said if the president does it, it can not be wrong. Jackson ignored rulings, Trump doesn’t even have to do that. Trump controls the courts. We progressed to a degree even worse than Jackson.