As President Donald Trump’s broken promises to end the affordability crisis and not wage new wars drag Republicans down in the polls ahead of next month’s midterm elections, people close to the president are reportedly urging him to declare martial law in the name of preventing voter fraud, an issue that’s exceedingly rare and statistically negligible.
Axios’ Brittany Gibson reported Friday that Republican activists with Trump’s ear are advocating extraordinary measures to prevent what they insist, without evidence, could be a rigged midterm election.
Among them is attorney Peter Ticktin, who has been Trump’s friend since high school and who said during a September 30 video call for MAGA election activists that “there would have to be martial law” in the event of “another rigged election.”
Ticktin was referring to the 2020 contest, which the Trump administration’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) called “the most secure in American history.”
Trump’s “Big Lie” that Democrats stole the election fueled the deadly January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection.
Pressed on the matter by Axios, Ticktin doubled down on endorsing extreme measures, saying there will “probably need to be commandeering of ballots and election equipment to make sure that we can get to the bottom of it before anything further occurs.”
Ticktin represented former Mesa County, Colorado Clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted in 2024 of seven felony and misdemeanor counts arising from a plot to illegally access her county’s election system in an effort to investigate unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Peters—whose 9-year prison sentence was commuted in May by Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis—was also on the September 30 call. She has been pushing for the replacement of electronic voting systems with hand-marked paper ballots tallied by manual recounts.
This, despite the Trump-era CISA saying after the 2020 election that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Trump fired CISA Director Christopher Krebs after he repeatedly defended the integrity of the election in the face of mounting MAGA misinformation in the weeks before the Capitol attack.
According to a report published Tuesday by Votebeat, Peters has said she traveled to Washington seven times and met with senior officials at the Justice and Commerce departments. She and Ticktin also visited Trump at the White House in June, and Peters met with the president again this month.
Also on the September 20 video call was Cleta Mitchell, who participated in Trump’s infamous January 2021 phone call in which the president pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to reverse his narrow loss in the state. Mitchell now heads the right-wing Election Integrity Network and is pushing the administration to use federal authority to force changes to election procedures.
“I can call the president anytime I want to—and I have,” said Mitchell, who declined to say when she last spoke to Trump. “I told the president this: I wish that the people in your administration knew or cared as much about election integrity as you do.”
Other election deniers, including former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, have called on Trump to issue a national emergency declaration to ban voting machines or even suspend the election—something most legal experts say he cannot do.
“Emergency powers are not just a blank check for the president to go do whatever they want,” Derek Tisler, counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program, told Axios. “The president still has to act within the Constitution and within statutes set by Congress.”
Election fraud is an exceptionally rare occurrence. A Brennan Center study of voter fraud research found that studies put the incidence of voter impersonation fraud at between 0.0003% and 0.0025%, while a Washington Post analysis cited by the center found just 31 credible instances of voter impersonation fraud out of more than 1 billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014.
While isolated instances of election fraud do occur, researchers have repeatedly found that they are nowhere near the scale required to alter the outcome of a national election. Many allegations turn out to be administrative errors, mistaken records, or unsubstantiated claims.
There is also no credible evidence that foreign-manufactured voting machine components have been used to orchestrate the sort of nationwide electoral conspiracy described by Ticktin and other MAGA allies.
Calls for extraordinary election interventions come as Trump and Republicans face deep voter dissatisfaction. A Financial Times–Focaldata poll published earlier this week found Trump’s overall approval rating at 34%, with only 25% of registered voters approving of his handling of the economy and roughly 20% approving of his management of inflation.
The president’s economic woes have been compounded by the illegal US-Israeli war of choice against Iran, which has driven up consumer costs—especially for fuel—amid an ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
According to Reuters, consumer prices rose 3.7% this year through September, while gasoline prices jumped 9.1% in a single month. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 78% of Americans blamed Trump’s policies for inflation.
All of this has Republicans increasingly concerned about losing control of Congress.
Citing its own polling, Fox News reported Wednesday that “if the election were today, 54% of voters say they would back the Democratic candidate in their House district and 45% would support the Republican. That is outside the margin of error and is a wider lead than last month, when Democrats were ahead by 51%-44%.”
All of this has left numerous election experts worried that the president could resort to extreme measures. He hasn’t exactly assuaged their concerns.
In an August interview, conservative broadcaster Wayne Allyn Root on Real America’s Voice asked Trump about declaring a national security emergency ahead of the midterms.
“Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK?” Trump replied. “I’ll leave it at that.”
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