PALM BEACH, FLORIDA – FEBRUARY 1: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters and members of the media at Mar-a-Lago on February 1, 2026 in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump is attending the wedding of Dan Scavino, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, and Erin Elmore, the Department of State Director of Art in Embassies, at Mar-a-Lago. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)
A draft 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 have said they are in coordination with the White House.
A version of the order, dated April 12, 2025, has been circulating among anti-voting groups, and some progressive groups, since last year.
Peter Ticktin, a Trump ally and a leader of the effort, provided the April 12 version to Democracy Docket. It’s titled: “Establishing Security, Integrity, and Transparency for United States Elections with Protections Against Foreign Interference.”
A social media account affiliated with the Maryland chapter of the Election Integrity Network — the anti-voting coalition led by conservative lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell — originally posted the April 12 version last spring.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that it had obtained an early version of the order, but it did not publish it.
The Post additionally referred to what may be a more recent version of the order, which it said “claims China interfered in the 2020 election.” The version provided by Ticktin to Democracy Docket does not mention China or 2020.
Lawyers and legal experts have explicitly said that an order giving the president the power to take control of elections would be blatantly unconstitutional.
Trump said Friday he has “never heard about it.”
SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE DRAFT ORDER
The draft order is riddled with errors. At one point, it refers to “[Executive Order] 13848 Section 1(g);” there is no Section 1(g) in that executive order. And neither of the two laws that it cites for providing the president emergency authority pursuant to the National Emergencies Act — the Federal Information Security Modernization Act and the Defense Production Act — actually provides emergency powers.
Ticktin, who attended military school with Trump, is an 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.
Asked to confirm the draft order and whether the administration was considering it or any other like it, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson responded: “President Trump just addressed this himself: ‘No. I’ve never heard about it.’”
Jackson included a link to a social media video of a PBS reporter asking the president whether he was considering a national emergency around the midterm election.
This story has been updated.