Trump Will Take Control of the Midterms–If This Florida Lawyer Gets His Way (original) (raw)

Chances are you have never heard of Peter Ticktin. That’s okay. Until a few years ago, most civilians did not recognize the names Dan Scavino or Laura Loomer or even Steve Bannon. Yet those three and others have all moved from the Republican fringes to become influential figures in President Donald Trump’s orbit.

Now, Ticktin, an 80-year-old South Florida lawyer, is aiming to play a key role in trying to upend 250 years of American election law by persuading Trump to issue an executive order that would allow the president to seize control of this fall’s midterm balloting process. “Well, he has to,” Ticktin tells Vanity Fair. “I wouldn’t recommend this to the president if it were not actually an election emergency occurring, where foreign interests are putting their thumb on the scale of our elections.”

How would they do that? It’s complicated. Ticktin connects dots alleging automated voting trickery stretching from Venezuela to Antrim County, Michigan, to Beijing. “The only reason Donald Trump is in office now is because the computer data center in Belgrade, Serbia, was disabled by certain American actors in 2024,” Ticktin says, mysteriously. “But they’re never going to let that happen again.” By “they,” he means the Chinese, the World Economic Forum, and the Democrats—who, Ticktin claims, are seeking a Senate majority next year in order to impeach Trump and Vice President JD Vance and install New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries as president.

All of which might be dismissed as garden-variety conspiracy, not to mention being beyond the organizational capacity of the Democratic Party. Except that Ticktin and Trump have a long history. The two men have known one another for 65 years, going back to their time as classmates at the New York Military Academy, a relationship Ticktin detailed in his 2020 book, What Makes Trump Tick. More recently, Ticktin was part of Trump’s legal team in a 2022 lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others that alleged a broad racketeering scheme to create false allegations against Trump’s 2016 campaign. “When I was hired to assist Alina Habba as local counsel in Florida, I had a long meeting with the president, and I said, ‘What do I call you?’ Because I’ve always called him Donald,” Ticktin says of his work on the lawsuit. “He looked at Alina and he said, ‘Oh, he can call me Donald, because after all, I’ve known him so long, and he is so much older than I am.’” Ticktin pauses. “For the record, I’m four and a half months older than him.” (The lawsuit was eventually dismissed, with a federal judge calling it “frivolous” and issuing sanctions against Habba, Ticktin, and other lawyers. They appealed, but an appellate court affirmed the case’s dismissal and upheld the sanctions against the attorneys. Habba did not respond to a request for comment.)

Ticktin says he began talking with Trump about election-integrity issues at least a year ago, and followed up, most recently, in an email earlier this month. “I can’t stop,” he says, “because of what I know.” Ticktin is reluctant to get into detail about his “line of communication” with the administration, or about which Cabinet secretary he says is spearheading the midterms election-integrity effort. “They trust me,” he says. “I don’t want to act in a way that’s not trustworthy.”

A White House spokeswoman did not respond to questions regarding Trump’s relationship with Ticktin, and directed me to the president’s answer, on February 27, when a PBS reporter asked whether he was considering issuing an executive order related to the midterms. “No,” the president said. “I’ve never heard about it.”

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Attorney Peter Ticktin speaks with clients in his law office on Deerfield Beach, Florida, in March 2009.

Getty Images.

Ticktin isn’t the only person trying to encourage Trump to seize control of the elections. Micheal Flynn, the former lieutenant general and first-term Trump national security adviser, has promoted the idea, as has the right-wing activist and author Jerome Corsi. Flynn convened a meeting in Washington last month billed as “a critical roundtable to address election integrity.” According to ProPublica, the event attracted current administration officials Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer who is reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, who is in charge of election integrity at the Department of Homeland Security, as well as conservative activists including Cleta Mitchell, who has pushed false claims about noncitizen voting and now runs the Election Integrity Network.

Senator Mark Warner is trying to sound the alarm, even as potential election mischief is being overshadowed by life-and-death events like the war on Iran. “This is of critical importance,” the Virginia Democrat tells me. “One thing we should have learned about Trump is he doesn’t hide his intentions, including the notion to call for federal elections.” Warner is particularly concerned that Trump officials could create a pretext for Trump to take over the voting. “Tulsi Gabbard is a disaster, and she’s chasing debunked theories about the 2020 election,” Warner says, referring to the director of national intelligence’s recent presence at the raid of an election office in Fulton County, Georgia. “She could be the perpetrator of this—putting out a raw piece of intelligence that purports to show foreign interference,” as an excuse for Trump’s intervention.

A Gabbard spokeswoman, Olivia Coleman, said she “would especially encourage you to focus on the very real vulnerabilities uncovered in the electronic voting machines.” Coleman also pointed me to a February letter from Gabbard to Warner and others in Congress saying the director’s office “will not irresponsibly share incomplete intelligence assessments concerning foreign or other malign interference in US elections.”

Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is hardly reassured. He is assembling a “prebunking” team of former intelligence officials who could knock down attempts at disinformation. “I have a sense of urgency on this,” Warner says. “When we’re talking about Laura Loomer being able to call the shots on who does and doesn’t get jobs in the administration, and bragging about her ability to fire a four-star general, we’ve passed into the realm of the absurd.”

Loomer has gone from incendiary far-right provocateur to informal Trump adviser and loyalty enforcer, digging through the backgrounds of political officials in search of insufficient fealty to the MAGA cause and using social media to scorch her targets. Last year Loomer’s accusations appeared to trigger the dismissal of General Timothy Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency.

Ticktin’s style is considerably more mild-mannered, and he claims that the changes he’s pushing, including banning voting machines and mail-in ballots, wouldn’t be all that disruptive or difficult to implement. “We already have paper ballots,” he says. “The main change is the ballots would be hand-counted in public. If we don’t, the machines take over, and the machines can determine the outcome of the election. From a Democrat point of view, they’re gonna want the machines.”

Ticktin, in the wake of the 2008 subprime collapse, handled major mortgage-fraud cases, and he has won a settlement for a family whose mortally injured son’s organs were harvested without proper permission. He is currently representing Tina Peters, the former Colorado county clerk who was convicted on criminal charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, and has represented several January 6 participants, including Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader, in their bids to receive full pardons for their roles in the attack on the Capitol. “Donald Trump won the 2020 election,” Ticktin says. “I mean, Donald Trump obtained more legitimate votes and should have won.” What about all the investigations and lawsuits that turned up no meaningful fraud? “Some of them were corrupt,” he says. “But most of them, nobody ever looked at the evidence. It was a question of standing. We know much more now than we knew then.”

Ticktin has also had his law license suspended twice for conflicts of interest, and the biography on his firm’s site claims the film Philadelphia was originally going to be called Miami, with its story inspired by a client of Ticktin’s. “That’s insane,” says Ron Nyswaner, the Philadelphia screenwriter. “Among the many, many lies we get from Trump and his people, that’s one of them.” (Ticktin says the reference was to a possible unrelated production.) The firm’s site also has a link to “Peter’s Poems,” including “The Toronto Subway System” and “The Hamburger” (“That special sauce is what I dread / Like heroin, it lifts its addictive head”).

The Constitution, Ticktin admits, leaves election logistics to the states. So last year he created an “outline” for an executive order justifying presidential intervention because of what he believes are foreign threats to the electoral system. More recently, a 17-page draft executive order filling in Ticktin’s framework has circulated in conservative circles; it ties together everything from the Defense Production Act to a law related to federal holidays. Ticktin claims he does not know who wrote the longer document. “It might have been Jerome Corsi,” he says.

Corsi, who aggressively promoted doubts about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, says it wasn’t him and he doesn’t know who wrote the draft either, though he calls Ticktin “instrumental” in the larger effort. Whoever the authors might be, Corsi agrees with the draft order’s aims, and says the necessity of a Trump election takeover will soon become clearer, as administration investigations uncover new “hard evidence” of voter fraud in Arizona and Georgia. “Donald Trump has said repeatedly in the second term that one of his goals is to prove the 2020 election was stolen,” Corsi says. “I’ve known Donald Trump for over 40 years...he’s not going to let the midterms be run with all these things in place to create more fraud.”

“This draft executive order rewrites the laws of 50 states and creates brand-new laws with no input from Congress or the states it would affect,” says Devon Ombres, the senior director for courts and legal policy at the Center for American Progress. “The laws it cites don’t give the president the authority to do these things.”

Trump typically cares little for legal niceties. His style is to push boundaries until someone stops him—if they stop him. And actually imposing an executive order might not even be necessary to alter the midterm dynamics. Simply floating the idea of extreme measures might serve the purpose of making less extreme interference—like new voter ID laws and restrictions on mail-in ballots—seem downright tolerable. Increased chatter about foreign interference could also help undermine the credibility of the midterm results. Polling in advance of the 2024 presidential election found a majority of voters were already worried about possible election interference by Russia and China.

One irony is that federal mechanisms to thwart interference were beefed up during Trump’s first term, only to be dismantled during his second. One side effect is that a presidential takeover of elections—an idea long considered outlandish—may now sound more plausible. “We’ve seen this over and over again, the mainstreaming of radical ideas,” says Charlie Sykes, the conservative commentator and an avowed Never Trumper. “Back in 2020, after the election, people were saying the vice president can overturn the Electoral College on January 6. And I rolled my eyes. You know what happened.”