Election deniers peddling conspiracies about voting machines have gotten President Donald Trump’s attention less than a month before the midterms.
Trump on Monday reportedly met with conspiracy theorist Tina Peters, who for months has been urging Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to investigate voting machines using power purportedly vested to him under the executive order, which declared a national emergency on certain Chinese software and parts.
“The president is taking it seriously,” former U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin said Tuesday on an episode of the conservative talk show “Real America’s Voice.”
Martin also invoked Trump’s priority elections legislation, which has been stalled in the Senate for months, as a reason to focus on a voting machine crackdown.
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“If the 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,” Martin said. “It’s not a local issue when it’s national security. And it’s clearly national security.”
The push to use an EO signed during Trump’s first term comes as Republicans in the administration rush to implement efforts to combat unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud. As the Nov. 3 midterms draw closer, longtime right-wing concerns about voting machines — which the government has already approved for states to use on Election Day — have increasingly circulated among fringe conspiracy circles and members of the Cabinet.
Central to the allegations is Peters, a former county election clerk from Colorado who was convicted in 2024 of tampering with county voting equipment before Democratic Gov. Jared Polis commuted her sentence in May. Other proponents include Martin, who left the Justice Department in August, and Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who says she wants Lutnick to “announce and implement a plan” to ensure the electronic voting systems are not “compromised or manipulated.”
In recent months, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has sent a series of public letters alleging China and Russia have compromised state-owned voting machines, after a White House task force in July asserted that China had obtained extensive American voter-registration data. Because nearly all U.S. voting machines contain parts made in China, DHS asserts, using those systems would allow foreign adversaries to sway election results.
Experts from the Brennan Center for Justice and other nonpartisan democracy researchers note that while all voting systems possess inherent technological vulnerabilities, certified machines used in U.S. elections remain fundamentally secure and reliable, with no evidence of widespread manipulation.
In September, Mullin announced his plan to help states transition from electronic voting to paper ballots, carry out audits of voting equipment and push out software updates before November.
The federal government lacks the power to more directly intervene in locally administered elections: Under Mullin’s proposal, state participation in those security initiatives would be voluntary.
But Peters wants to go further. Her plan, detailed on her website, puts Lutnick at the center of a more aggressive effort to require states to abandon the use of vote-counting machines in favor of hand-tallied ballots.
The push to enlist the commerce secretary dates at least to August 2025. Emails obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight last month show that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles connected election-denial activists Will Huff and Conrad Reynolds with Martin through a staffer, partially in hopes of getting Peters a meeting with Trump, who had aggressively lobbied Polis for her commutation.
In email correspondence between Martin, Huff and Reynolds, the three discussed lobbying the administration to use the 2019 executive order to order Lutnick to seize voting equipment.
Huff said the move “can immediately force states to move to hand-marked and hand-counted ballots like the President wishes.” The proposals also included eliminating most mail and absentee voting and sharply curtailing early voting.
In an August episode of their podcast, Reynolds said Lutnick gave the pair “two-and-a-half hours of his time” to hear their proposal. He said the secretary said he was “shocked at what we had to say” and “would be getting on it.”
Commerce’s involvement in the administration’s election integrity agenda has never been a public-facing strategy. The department did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Lutnick’s involvement.
When asked about Peters’ visit with Trump at the Oval Office, a DHS spokesperson said that “concerns over voting processes, data security and registration practices have made it clear that action is required” and pointed The Washington Sun to its election infrastructure plan issued last month.
A Department of Justice spokesperson told The Sun the department isn’t involved in any plans to sow doubt about voting systems.
“The Department of Justice does not support, and is making no preparations to support, efforts to declare certified voting equipment unreliable or unusable absent credible, verified evidence and the legal process for doing so. Any suggestion that such an initiative is underway at the Department is false,” the spokesperson said.
The White House refused to confirm the content of Trump’s meeting with Peters and declined to give additional comment.
The 2019 order championed by Peters and Martin initially was mandated by Trump to declare a national emergency on any critical infrastructure, which includes election systems built using materials or software produced in China. It grants the commerce secretary the power to “prohibit any transaction” of American infrastructure supplied by foreign adversaries.
Martin said Peters brought her plan to Trump earlier this week. The two discussed having Lutnick potentially mandate a federal investigation of state-owned election technology for connections to Chinese parts, which could empower him to order mandatory restrictions or changes to voting machines ahead of the midterms.
“Time is now the controlling variable. The U.S. does not need to prove a foreign adversary already changed a past election result before acting,” Peters’ website states.
Elections experts say hand-counting votes can be slow or introduce errors, while Democrats say manual counts set up additional opportunities to sow doubt about election integrity.
Last month, Senate Democrats accused DHS of trying to federalize elections through pressure campaigns concerning access to voter data and grant funding — characterizing the administration’s recent actions as “calculated efforts to undermine confidence in our elections.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday that his party has been preparing “for months to stop unconstitutional, corrupt schemes” like what Peters proposes.
“We’re taking nothing for granted,” Schumer wrote on X. “And we’ll be ready to see and beat these ghouls in court.”
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