Now here’s a story that’ll make you set your coffee down. Cleta Mitchell, the big D.C. election lawyer, and Tina Peters, the Colorado clerk who went to prison over her own election stunts, are marching around Washington telling anybody who’ll listen that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ought to seize the country’s voting machines before Election Day. Yes, the Commerce Secretary. The man whose actual job is trade and the census. Apparently he’s supposed to ride into your county courthouse like a one-man cavalry because a lawyer found a regulation from February 2024 she likes the sound of.
I have questions for the manager, and the first one is: since when does Washington run our elections? Last I checked, and you can check it too with your own two eyes, elections are run by your county clerk. The lady down at the courthouse with the folding tables and the volunteer ladies checking you in. That’s not a bug in the system, that’s the whole point of it. Now a K Street lawyer wants a Cabinet secretary to reach into every county in America and haul off the machines a month before the vote. That’s not election security, that’s election seizure.
The scheme, as reported by Democracy Docket, leans on a 2019 executive order and the claim that voting machines are “critical infrastructure,” plus some late-August remarks from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin about parts from China and Russia. Mitchell posted Tuesday that Lutnick should “immediately announce and implement a plan” to make sure the 2026 machines aren’t compromised. Peters, meanwhile, reportedly carried the idea straight into the Oval Office on Monday, according to former DOJ pardon attorney Ed Martin, who says the president is “taking it seriously.” Well, I sure hope somebody up there is taking the Constitution seriously too, because it’s sitting right there in Article I.
Here’s the plain truth, and you don’t need a law degree from Yale to see it. David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research said it about as clear as it can be said: “The Commerce Secretary has no authority. If the Commerce Secretary tried to exert authority, first of all, the states would laugh at him.” He’s right, and every one of us who’s ever served as a poll watcher or helped at a church precinct knows he’s right. States run elections. Counties run elections. That’s the design, and it’s a good one, precisely so no one man in Washington can put his thumb on the scale.
And can we talk about the messengers? Tina Peters is a convicted election denier. She broke the very rules she claimed she was defending, and now she’s advising presidents. Ed Martin’s out here saying if Congress won’t pass the SAVE America Act, “the president’s going to have to do what he’s going to do.” Hon, that’s not how this works. That’s the kind of talk that gives every finger-wagging liberal on television a free commercial about how conservatives hate democracy. Stop handing them the microphone.
I’m as pro-election-integrity as the next woman who thinks you should show ID to buy cough syrup, so showing it to vote seems mighty reasonable. But integrity means the rules are followed by everybody, including the people wearing badges in Washington. You don’t fix trust in elections by having a Cabinet secretary confiscate the equipment in October. You fix it by letting your neighbors count the votes where everybody can watch, same as we’ve done since before my grandmother was born. Anything else is just Washington telling you it knows better. And we’ve had quite enough of that.