The Election Deniers in Trump’s Ear

Of all the outside advisers urging President Trump to seize control of federal elections this fall, the attorney Peter Ticktin can claim the deepest ties; the two men went to military school together as teenagers. In 2022, Ticktin helped Trump sue Hillary Clinton. This year, he pushed Trump to secure a pardon for Tina Peters, a former Colorado clerk convicted of charges related to tampering with election equipment.

Which is why it might be worth listening when Ticktin says that Trump could do something soon to take over elections. “He’s the only one that I know for sure has the understanding of the severity of it,” Ticktin told us this month before taking the stage at an election-skeptic conference in Las Vegas. The way Ticktin sees it, there are three possible outcomes this fall. The first—a smooth election—won’t happen in his view because, he claims without evidence, Democrats already cheated in the primaries. The second is that Trump takes action before the election to prevent cheating. The last option is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around November 3. “Either martial law, or step aside,” he told us about Trump’s choices in the last scenario. When we asked about the prospect of riots if Trump tries to overturn the election results, Ticktin said he was not concerned. “Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are,” he said.   

Trump has already tried to claim greater federal control over elections, which under the Constitution are administered primarily at the state and local level. In February, he said Republicans should nationalize voting in at least 15 places. In August, when the television and radio host Wayne Allyn Root pushed Trump to declare a “national-security emergency” to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and other measures, Trump played coy: “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.” Later that month, Trump posted a Root column on the topic, with a headline that described the plan as “foolproof.” Peters announced after meeting with Trump in June that the president “basically said to his lead counsel to do what I was asking.” In a prime-time address at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump again repeated the false claim that he had won the 2020 election, and sarcastically encouraged his supporters to “cheat like hell” in the upcoming elections.

[Read: Trump’s dream world in Dallas]

To head off a crisis, Trump’s White House and Cabinet advisers have been working for months to move Trump’s focus away from baseless theories of election fraud peddled by people like Ticktin, Root, and Peters. At the same time, they have authorized as-yet-unsuccessful efforts to uncover actual evidence that would make the conspiracies more credible: Trump’s advisers gathered once-classified documents that he could share on genuine foreign efforts to influence elections, set up a prime-time address where he again falsely suggested that the 2020 election was stolen, authorized the seizure of Georgia election records, and reviewed voting equipment used in Puerto Rico. None of these efforts has revealed the type of large-scale fraud that Trump has alleged, though they have allowed the president to keep the idea of election theft in the news. Meanwhile, Trump has failed to persuade Senate Republicans to pass legislation, called the SAVE America Act, that would restrict mail-in voting and impose new voter-ID and citizenship checks on ballot access, and the Supreme Court has rejected his effort to restrict voting by mail.

At the White House, the constant lobbying by election deniers continues to be viewed as problematic. A White House official told us that Ticktin, Root, and Peters play no role in election policy at the White House. A Justice Department spokesperson said there are no plans “to declare certified voting equipment unreliable or unusable absent credible, verified evidence and the legal process for doing so.” Suggestions that “such an initiative is under way at the Department is false,” the spokesperson said. Some officials, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, have said publicly that there are no plans to forcibly take over the role of state election administrators or deploy federal officials to polling places, though Mullin said there could be exceptions in the case of “specific threats.”

[Read: MAGA thinks Maduro will prove Trump won in 2020]

But the prospect of Trump deciding to act on the demands of his most fervent election-denying supporters has remained a constant threat, one that even Trump’s inner circle admits remains possible. Such measures are broadly opposed by Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and within Trump’s own administration, not least because they’re considered bad politics. Polling commissioned by Republicans earlier this year found that if the SAVE America Act passed, it was likely to increase Democratic enthusiasm and suppress Republican turnout, particularly in red states, such as Florida, that have long embraced mail-in voting, according to a person who has reviewed the numbers.

The tension within Trump’s orbit has created an added layer of high-stakes uncertainty in the final weeks of the midterm-election campaign. Ticktin told us he expects that if Democrats win, Trump could proclaim military control based on the notion that voting equipment is vulnerable to foreign adversaries. Root, a LindellTV host and Gateway Pundit columnist, told us that he sends his columns directly to Trump by email and text; Trump regularly reposts them on Truth Social. “I hope he takes orders from Wayne Allyn Root,” Root told us last week. “Because in my opinion, the election is going to be stolen and there is no way to keep it from being stolen without declaring a national emergency.”

In a statement, the White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said the “real story” is that “evidence of voter fraud and non-citizens voting in our elections continues to pile up,” even though “the media and Democrats” have been denying this for decades.

“The ‘danger’ in our elections is caused by extreme Democrats who refuse to enact basic commonsense measures that ensure Americans, and Americans only, decide our elections,” Bis said.

One group hoping to steer Trump’s decisions on the election is fully enmeshed in the government, a collection of senior advisers and Cabinet secretaries who are coordinated through a regular elections working group that meets at the White House. The other typically operates direct to camera or keyboard, powered by right-wing platforms including Rumble. Ticktin, Peters, and Root are among this set.

Their faithful followers gathered at an off-Strip hotel in Las Vegas earlier this month to detail how Trump could, in their minds, avert electoral calamity this fall. The lawyer, recently released felon, and columnist each took to the stage at various points during the “Storm Summit,” billed as a way to achieve “honest elections” and help save the country from a rigged vote. The attendees we spoke with said they anticipate that the midterm election will be canceled or temporarily suspended, or that the results or certification of winners will be in limbo for an undetermined period of time.

When it was Ticktin’s turn to address the crowd, he described a “nightmare scenario” in which electronic voting equipment central to many 2020 conspiracies diverts votes from Republican candidates to Democrats, and delivers the party control of Congress. Then, he ominously predicted, Democrats would have enough support (including from anti-Trump Republicans) to impeach and remove Trump and Vice President Vance from office. But Trump, Ticktin predicted, wouldn’t stand for it. “There’s not another soul on this planet that understands what it is to be the president of the United States and have to leave office for a rigged election so someone else can step in and steal the country,” Ticktin said. He added, “He’s not ever going to do that again.” The crowd—some wearing 45-47 hats and shirts reading 2020 ITS NOT OVER YET—whistled and cheered from under a banner depicting Trump as a matador waving the American flag.

[Read: The election deniers’ long game]

Root got a standing ovation after assuring attendees that, according to research done by a friend, the election would be upended if Trump were to declare a national-security emergency. In reality, experts told us, such declarations give the president access to specific statutory powers enacted by Congress. None provides the president with control over elections. “There seems to be a wild misperception on the part of some Trump allies that an emergency declaration allows the president to do anything he wants,” Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told us. “It is not a blank check.”

Nonetheless, Root described victory as inevitable if Trump issues such a declaration before November 3. “We win,” he said, “because Democrats can’t win a gosh darn election without cheating.” Root, who is based in Las Vegas, described himself to us as “a tough guy, a Jewish kid from a Mafia neighborhood in New York, who knows how to fight.” He said he was “the only Republican I know who isn’t a freaking golf player with yellow pants.”

Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to nearly nine years in prison after prosecutors said she deceived colleagues in order to grant an unauthorized person access to voting equipment under her control in 2020. (She maintains that she did nothing wrong.) Trump and Ticktin helped secure her clemency from Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, earlier this year.

Peters acknowledged to us that there was widespread discontent among MAGA supporters that nothing has changed about the nation’s voting systems—and that they want to see the government do something, quickly. “They can’t trust elections—they’ve seen too much,” she told us in an interview, adding, “We don’t have a lot of time to fix this.” What, we asked, was her message to the president and those in a position to make changes to election systems? Peters answered after a long pause: “Listen to the people outside of the administration.”