Let us begin, as one must, with the facts, because the facts here are genuinely remarkable. Tina Peters, the former Mesa County, Colorado clerk who was convicted for her role in breaching her own county’s election equipment, reportedly met with President Trump in the Oval Office on Monday to pitch a plan under which Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick would seize voting machines nationwide. Ed Martin, the former Justice Department pardon attorney turned election conspiracist, says the president is “taking it seriously.” I would like to gently complicate your understanding of why this matters, and then complicate the complication.
The legal theory, such as it is, holds that a 2019 executive order on protecting American-made technology, combined with regulations that took effect in February 2024, empowers the Commerce Secretary to “mitigate or eliminate known threats to critical infrastructure,” and that voting machines qualify. Cleta Mitchell, the attorney best known for the January 2, 2021 phone call pressing Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes, promoted this reading on social media Tuesday with the confidence of someone who has read neither the order nor the Constitution. David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research put it with admirable economy: “The Commerce Secretary has no authority. If the Commerce Secretary tried to exert authority, first of all, the states would laugh at him.” The states run elections. This is not a contested proposition among people who have read Article I. It would be struck down, as Becker notes, and everyone pitching it knows that the seizure itself was never really the point.
Here is the first complication. The scheme is legally absurd, yes, but it is not legally random. It is a deliberate search for any statutory or regulatory hook, however tenuous, that can dress a political project in the costume of process. The 2019 order was about supply-chain security. The February 2024 regulations are about critical infrastructure risk mitigation. Neither mentions elections, because neither was ever about elections. What Peters and Mitchell are doing is what a certain strain of movement conservatism has done for decades: raiding the administrative state’s toolshed for instruments it can repurpose against the administrative state’s own legitimacy. The irony is thick enough to spread.
Now the second complication, the one that should actually worry you. The constitutional failure of this plan is a feature, not a bug. Every failed lawsuit, every struck-down executive order, every dead bill becomes evidence for the underlying narrative: that courts and Congress and the states are themselves compromised, that only bold unilateral action can save the republic. Becker observed that the administration has relied on conspiracy theorists to drive election policy for over 20 months, and that every one of those efforts has failed. Failed efforts are the fuel. A movement that cannot win within the system is being systematically taught that the system is the enemy. That is the structural story, and it is considerably more durable than any single Oval Office meeting.
One notes, in passing, the supporting cast. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in late August that voting machines “use parts from China and Russia, and foreign places, and are therefore compromised,” which is the kind of statement that sounds alarming until one recalls that nearly all modern electronics contain foreign-made components, including, presumably, the phones on which this theory is being texted. A cabinet secretary supplying the predicate for a legally illiterate seizure scheme is not a fringe figure. That is the part that distinguishes this moment from 2020, when the machinery of government at least pretended to keep its distance.
So no, Lutnick will not successfully seize the voting machines. The states would laugh, the courts would strike, the Constitution would hold. But the meeting happened, the theory is circulating at the highest level, and the failure is already being pre-converted into grievance. The literature on democratic backsliding is quite clear on this point: it is rarely the coup that gets you. It is the normalization of the coup conversation.