An octogenarian former classmate of President Donald Trump is urging him to overturn two and a half centuries of election law and take control of this November’s vote.Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old South Florida lawyer who met Trump at New York Military Academy, told Vanity Fair that he has advised the 79-year-old president to issue an executive order that would allow him to seize control of the midterm election.“Well, he has to,” Ticktin told the magazine. “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.”Ticktin sketched out a conspiracy theory that spans from Venezuela to Antrim County, Michigan, to China, and he offered a cryptic explanation for how Trump managed to overcome the sinister forces working against him to win re-election. “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 claimed. “But they’re never going to let that happen again.”He claimed the Democrats are working with the Chinese and the World Economic Forum and plotting to impeach Trump and Vice President JD Vance and install New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries as president if they win back a Senate majority next year, and Ticktin called on the president to ban voting machines and paper ballots to prevent all that from unfolding.“We already have paper ballots,” Ticktin said. “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.”Other Trump allies – including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and birther conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi – have urged Trump to take control of the elections, and current White House lawyer Kurt Olsen and Homeland Security official Heath Honey have taken part in meetings to discuss the topic.“Donald Trump has said repeatedly in the second term that one of his goals is to prove the 2020 election was stolen,” Corsi said. “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.”Ticktin admits the Constitution puts states in charge of elections, but he wrote up an “outline” for an executive order justifying presidential action due to what he believes are foreign threats, and a 17-page memo going into greater detail has circulated in conservative circles, although both he and Corsi deny writing the longer document.“Donald Trump won the 2020 election,” said Ticktin, who has represented former Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and election denying county clerk Tina Peters. “I mean, Donald Trump obtained more legitimate votes and should have won.”Ticktin waved off the spate of investigations and lawsuits following that election that turned no meaningful evidence of fraud.”Some of them were corrupt,” he said. “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.”
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