Election deniers Cleta Mitchell and Tina Peters want Trump’s commerce secretary to regulate voting machines

Editor’s Note: This story has been corrected from an earlier version which reported that Mitchell and Peters have urged the commerce secretary to seize voting machines. We regret the error.

With Election Day less than a month away, anti-voting lawyer Cleta Mitchell and convicted election denier Tina Peters are pushing a scheme to have Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick exert last-minute regulatory authority over states’ use of voting machines, part of a broader push for the Trump administration to interfere with the midterm vote.

The scheme has been circulating among election deniers since late last year, but Peters has led the effort to bring it to President Donald Trump’s attention since August. On Monday, Peters reportedly met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss election security issues.

Peters, Martin and other conspiracy theorists have long pushed the false claims that voting machines are compromised because they use some foreign-made parts. Election deniers claim that poses a national security risk.

Now, they want the Trump administration to use that as justification to impose federal oversight of voting machines — which could open the door for the federal government to take control of electronic voting. 

And they believe that the commerce secretary already has authority to do that — a view that legal experts say is way off base.   

Ed Martin, a former Trump administraiton official, claimed on his online show that Peters discussed this scheme with Trump during this week’s White House visit.

“They were talking about the plans, and the one thing that they know is that Secretary [Markwayne] Mullin, of the Department of Homeland Security, came out in late August and conceded and said… ‘the machines for voting… use parts from China and Russia, and foreign places, and are therefore compromised,” Martin said. 

“The president is taking it seriously,” he added. “If Congress won’t pass the SAVE America Act — and they won’t — then the president’s going to have to do what he’s going to do. It’s not a local issue when it’s national security. And it’s clearly national security.”

In a plan released earlier this year, Peters wrote that she wants the commerce secretary to investigate voting machines, but she didn’t specify what other steps the Commerce Department should take, other than to “impose mitigation or prohibition where the regulatory standard is met.” 

Should Lutnick determine that voting machines are compromised as a national security risk, that could open the door for the Trump administration to intervene.

In the past, Peters has called on the Department of Defense to seize voting machines.

“Right now it’s very important for the Department of War — now I’m saying the Department of War because this is an international event that is going on with stealing our elections — Pete Hegseth needs to go in and demand to have these machines in their custody,” Peters said in an interview with far-right commentator Emerald Robinson in August. “Because this is evidence, this is hardcore evidence that other nations are coming in and influencing our elections.”

Mitchell also took to social media Tuesday to promote a similar Commerce scheme.

“Elections, including electronic voting machines, ARE critical infrastructure, so designated by President Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security in January 2017,” Mitchell wrote. “The Dept of Commerce, through the Biden years, completed the promulgation of regulations that took effect in February 2024, that require the Secretary of Commerce to take certain actions to mitigate or eliminate known threats to critical infrastructure.” 

Mitchell said there’s no need for Trump to declare a national elections emergency because, she argued, he already has, through a 2019 executive order Trump signed to protect U.S.-made technology,

“What is needed TODAY is for [Lutnick] to exercise his legal authority and responsibility to immediately announce and implement a plan to ensure that the electronic voting systems used in the 2026 elections are NOT compromised or manipulated by enemies, foreign or domestic,” Mitchell said.

Such an effort would be blatantly unconstitutional and get struck down in the courts, David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told Democracy Docket. 

“I can’t say this any more clearly: The commerce secretary has no authority,” Becker said. “If the commerce secretary tried to exert authority, first of all, the states would laugh at him.” 

“The administration has been relying upon conspiracy theorists to push election policy for over 20 months now,” he added. “These conspiracy theories have led to really bad policy decisions, whether they be executive orders or the SAVE America Act or DOJ lawsuits — and every one of these efforts has failed.”