A draft emergency 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 said they are in coordination with the White House.
Voting rights experts, democracy advocates, and at least one state election chief said Trump doesn’t have the authority to claim such powers — and any attempt would be blatantly unconstitutional.
The draft order — which is said to be based on a conspiracy theory that China interfered with the 2020 election — would allow Trump to unilaterally ban mail-in ballots and voting machines on the basis that they are susceptible to foreign interference.
The order comes from MAGA activists who have been coordinating with the White House. One of the advocates for the order is Peter Ticktin, the 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.
The Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives states — not the president — sole authority over elections.
Authoritarianism is a spectrum. We are more authoritarian than ever.
That doesn’t mean we weren’t authoritarian before.
I have a feeling you knew all that and just wanted to fight CptOblivius, though.
“More authoritarian than ever.” Please, tell me how you argue for a measurable difference in the severity of authoritarianism between current day and early- to mid-nineteenth century US slave states. Is there, perhaps, a particular group effected that makes this more severe? Is it worse because white citizens are victimised now? Wasn’t authoritarian when they used Zyklon B as part of southern-border security in the twentieth century? Is it the technological difference? Do you even know how surveillant the US has been in the past?
So fucking obnoxious and sneering to suggest you know more about something without clearly ever fucking learning about it. Go on though, explain how the slave-state wasn’t as bad.