{"id":44720,"date":"2025-10-24T13:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T20:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=44720"},"modified":"2025-10-24T13:00:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T20:00:15","slug":"officials-plot-to-have-trump-declare-national-emergency-in-2026-raising-fears-he-may-hijack-the-next-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2025\/10\/24\/officials-plot-to-have-trump-declare-national-emergency-in-2026-raising-fears-he-may-hijack-the-next-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Officials Plot to Have Trump Declare National Emergency in 2026, Raising Fears He May \u2018Hijack\u2019 the Next Election"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"President<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

US President Donald pumps his fist after taking questions from reporters on slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk while departing the White House on September 11, 2025 in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0(Photo by Win McNamee\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a federal strategy to control elections and rig our democracy,\u201d said a spokesperson for Fair Fight Action.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Stephen Prager<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oct 23, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voting rights<\/a> advocates are raising fears that the Trump administration<\/a> may attempt to \u201chijack\u201d the 2026 election after a new report revealed that a top election integrity official suggested invoking a \u201cnational emergency\u201d to justify a federal takeover of state-run election processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New York Times<\/a><\/em> reported on Wednesday that during a call in March with right-wing<\/a> activists, the woman who has since been appointed to President Donald Trump\u2019s newly created \u201celection integrity\u201d position within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had suggested that the president could declare a \u201cnational emergency\u201d to give his government new authority to dictate election rules typically decided by state and local governments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RECOMMENDED…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Pritzker<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Heather Honey, formerly a Pennsylvania-based private investigator who came to prominence as a leading proponent of Trump\u2019s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden<\/a>, said this authority would come from \u201can actual investigation\u201d of the loss, which she has baselessly argued was marred by widespread fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the US, elections are administered by states, with the president having no legal authority over how they are carried out. But Honey suggested that the Trump administration has \u201csome additional powers that don\u2019t exist right now,\u201d and that by using the investigation as a pretext, \u201cwe can take these other steps without Congress<\/a> and we can mandate that states do things and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seeming to recognize the extreme step she was proposing, Honey added: \u201cI don\u2019t know if that\u2019s really feasible and if the people around the president would let him test that theory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2020 election was subject<\/a> to numerous state-level recounts and audits and over 60 failed court challenges in state and federal jurisdictions\u2014many of which were dismissed by Republican and Trump-appointed judges for lack of merit and credible evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An investigation by the Associated Press<\/em><\/a> last year found that across the six battleground states Trump claimed were beset by widespread fraud, only 475 individual ballots out of millions of votes cast were flagged by election officials as \u201cpotentially\u201d affected by fraud. Even if every single one of the ballots had been proven fraudulent, it would not have been nearly enough to swing the election result in Trump\u2019s favor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, several aides and officials who served Trump during the waning days of his first administration testified<\/a> before the January 6<\/a> commission that the president was well aware he\u2019d lost the election, but continued to push false claims of fraud in an effort to cling to power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matt Crane, a former Republican election official who served until earlier this year as a consultant for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure<\/a> Security Agency (CISA)\u2014which Trump recently purged of election experts\u2014told the Times<\/em> that officials who have roposed relitigating the 2020 election \u201care not coming with an objective frame of mind to say, \u2018Let\u2019s look at the facts and see where that takes us.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey have their destination in mind and cherry-pick facts to help stand up their crazy theories, so there\u2019s nothing objective about it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week, the Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a> reported that the administration had begun this effort to reboot the election fraud narrative, with Trump tapping former campaign lawyer and \u201cStop the Steal\u201d proponent Kurt Olsen as a \u201cspecial government employee\u201d tasked with reinvestigating 2020. Olsen has reportedly already begun asking intelligence agencies for information about the 2020 election and has also suggested he wants to purge government employees who are disloyal to Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump has also sought to implement many of the proposals from the \u201cUS Citizens Elections Bill of Rights,\u201d<\/a> proposed by the Election Integrity Network<\/a> (EIN), a group of pro-Trump election deniers, of which Honey is a member. The group has become deeply influential during Trump\u2019s second term, receiving a briefing from the DHS in June on how a database run by the department can be used to verify the citizenship status of registered voters, according to a report from Democracy Docket<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The group has called for new restrictions on mail-in ballots, early voting, and to make it easier for voter rolls to be scrubbed and for election results to be challenged. Many of these proposals have made it in some form or another into Trump\u2019s executive order<\/a> on elections and the SAVE Act<\/a>, which Republicans<\/a> passed through the House earlier this year, that would require all voters to show passports or birth certificates in order to register to vote, which voting rights groups have denounced as a \u201cmodern-day poll tax.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Max Flugrath, the communications director for the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, noted<\/a>, \u201cJudges have blocked Trump\u2019s March executive order on elections\u2014a move courts called an overreach that belongs to the states, not the White House<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDespite the rulings, Trump allies are pressing ahead,\u201d Flugrath said. \u201cThe DOJ is collecting massive voter roll data, DHS is pressuring states to upload files, and Honey is spreading false claims and framing the directives as \u2018best practices.\u2019 It\u2019s election disinformation rebranded as policy.\u201d Those actions, he said, are being urged on by the EIN, which has promoted Trump \u201cpushing the limits of executive power.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Honey is just one of many EIN members with a direct line of communication to Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump has also elevated a leading EIN operative, Marcy McCarthy\u2014who also pushed<\/a> debunked theories of widespread illegal voting in Georgia\u2014to be CISA\u2019s director of public affairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EIN\u2019s founder, Cleta Mitchell, was notably one of the lawyers present<\/a> on Trump\u2019s phone call in January 2021 in which he attempted to pressure Georgia<\/a> election officials to \u201cfind\u201d him enough votes to be declared the winner of the state, which resulted in him being indicted three years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a podcast with a Christian nationalist influencer last month, Mitchell likewise pushed the idea that Trump could use emergency powers to assert control over the election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe president\u2019s authority is limited in his role with regard to elections except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States\u2014as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She seemed to suggest Trump was on board with the idea, saying, \u201cI think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flugrath said these statements, and those reported by the Times,<\/em> \u201cshould be a five-alarm fire,\u201d as they suggest Trump will use past false claims of voter fraud as \u201ca cover to hijack elections\u201d in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He noted that in April, Trump himself seemed to echo EIN\u2019s theories of sweeping authority, saying<\/a> during a speech that \u201cwe\u2019re gonna get good elections pretty soon\u201d because \u201cthe states are just an agent of the federal government.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTrump is embedding EIN operatives into the government to push his election takeover agenda, all built on lies about his 2020 loss,\u201d Flugrath said. \u201cEIN seems to be using a playbook to decimate the independence and fairness of elections: Sow doubt in elections, install loyalists in government, use doubt sowed to push an \u2018emergency,\u2019 and change election rules.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a federal strategy to control elections and rig our\u00a0democracy<\/a>,\u201d he continued. \u201cIndependent elections are the foundation of freedom. If Trump can control our elections, he can dismantle other checks on power. Protecting free, state-run elections is the firewall between democracy and\u00a0authoritarianism<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stephen Prager<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Full Bio ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US President Donald pumps his fist after taking questions from reporters on slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk while departing the White House on September 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. \u00a0(Photo by Win McNamee\/Getty Images) \u201cIt\u2019s a federal strategy to control elections and rig our democracy,\u201d said a spokesperson for Fair… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44720"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44721,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44720\/revisions\/44721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}