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

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 seize voting machines, as part of a broader effort 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, according to former U.S. Department of Justice pardon attorney Ed Martin. 

Peters, Martin and other conspiracists 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 seize voting machines. And they believe that the commerce secretary already has authority to do that — a view that legal experts say is way off base.   

Martin claims 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.”

It’s not exactly a new idea. For months, Peters and others have called on Trump to declare a national emergency to wrest control of aspects of voting from the states. But the latest scheme Peters is pushing revolves around a 2019 executive order Trump signed during his first term to protect U.S.-made technology, which Peters now wants to use to seize voting machines. 

Under that order, Peters believes Lutnick already has the authority to seize voting machines because they are a national security risk.

Mitchell took to social media Tuesday to promote the 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.

“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.

One small issue: The 2019 order doesn’t convey that authority to Lutnick at all. No federal official can seize control of election administration from the states and counties, who hold the power run elections under the U.S. Constitution.      

For that reason, 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.”