Pro-Trump activists are circulating a 17-page draft executive order claiming that China interfered in the 2020 election as a way to declare a national emergency and give the president extraordinary power over voting, The Washington Post reported this week.
Activists say they’re in coordination with the White House, The Washington Post wrote, but an official said any speculation about President Donald Trump’s actions or announcements is just that.
Asked by a PBS reporter on Friday about the proposed order, Trump said he’s “never heard of it.”
“Who told you that?” Trump asked the reporter.
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Under the draft order, Trump would be empowered to ban mail ballots and voting machines, Peter Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who is advocating for it, told the Post.
Ticktin, who represents former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, said Trump is “aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes.”
“That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it,” he said.
Would the draft order be successful?
Stephen Richer, a legal fellow with the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, said it’s already known that foreign governments have tried to interfere with past American elections, though doing so is generally challenging because the United States’ election infrastructure is so disaggregated across thousands of county and municipal governments. In addition, “there’s only so much electronic interference” that can be done as many vote on paper ballots, he said.
“I think where it’s more likely that foreign governments will get involved is in running ads on social media or trying to sow discontent on social media, as we know they have done in the past, or just trying to stir up Americans against each other,” Richer told Straight Arrow News. “And that’s not specific to China, but I know that China has played in this space.”
While China considered efforts to influence the U.S. election, according to a 2021 review, it ultimately did not go through with them.
“I don’t think that that would be a persuasive legal argument for taking broad authority of the administration of elections,” Richer said.
This is why Richer thinks an executive order of this kind would be “enjoined pretty quickly in the federal district courts.”
However, if it were to become law, “it would be like an earthquake hit election administration,” Richer said.
Many states have no excuse mail-in voting, he pointed out. Nearly 1-in-3 Americans chose the option in the 2024 presidential election.
Should the executive order go into effect, that would mean millions of people who were going to vote by mail will vote in person, Richer said, especially in Western states.
“All of a sudden, election administrators would have to find hundreds and thousands of more voting locations for all those millions of people to go to with respect to ballot tabulation,” Richer said.
Additionally, very few jurisdictions in the United States count their ballots by hand, Richer pointed out. Machines are “much faster, much more accurate and much less costly,” he explained.
To say that banning such machines would be a challenge is “quite an understatement,” Richer said.
And Richer would know. Before joining Cato, he was the Maricopa County Recorder. He was responsible for facilitating the contentious 2020 General Election in one of the most populous counties in America. After the county went for former President Joe Biden, his party revolted. Legislative leaders ordered an extensive review of the ballots, only to find that the total votes for Biden were slightly undercounted.
Trump’s past statements
Trump has long alleged fraud in the 2020 election, where he ultimately lost to Biden. However, there is no evidence of widespread fraud so severe as to have swayed the results, and multiple studies show it is extremely rare in general.
Still, banning mail-in ballots and requiring voter ID are both topics Trump has repeatedly brought up.
On Truth Social earlier this month, he said there will “be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” He later said he would be presenting legal arguments for voter I.D. in an executive order “shortly.”
The House of Representatives recently passed the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to vote in federal elections. Last March, Trump signed an executive order requiring proof of citizenship on voter registration forms and cutting funding to states that accept mail-in ballots after Election Day, both of which have been blocked by courts.
The response to the draft executive order would look pretty similar, Richer said. Courts would argue, Richer said, that the President doesn’t have unilateral authority to rewrite election law, and that the Constitution largely delegates lawmaking and administration authority to the states. If the federal government does have a role, courts would say it’s explicitly through the Congress, Richer added.
“This is another power grab from this Administration. This possible EO is not about election security. It is about political power and attempts to make it harder for eligible Americans to register, cast a ballot, and have their voices heard,” the League of Women Voters, one of the groups suing the Trump administration over the March order, wrote in a statement. “Court after court has already affirmed what the Constitution makes clear. The President’s authority over the administration of elections is minimal to nonexistent. The power to run elections rests with Congress and the states, not the White House.”
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. responded to the Post’s article by saying that lawmakers have been “raising the alarm for weeks about Trump’s attacks on our elections.”
“Now we’re getting details about how they might be planning to do it,” Warner said on X. “Let’s be clear: there’s no national emergency. This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters.”
