LONDON (The Telegraph) - MAGA allies of Donald Trump have said the president should use martial law if the Republicans lose the midterm elections.
Participants in the Precinct Project & Election Integrity video call on Sept 30 streamed on Rumble claimed that voter fraud could take place in the November elections and that postal votes were particularly at risk.
The call is a regular feature of the MAGA community, providing a platform for voices across the country, including Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, and Tina Peters, a prominent MAGA activist.
Peter Ticktin, a childhood friend of the U.S. president and an attorney, claimed that voter addresses were being changed on mail-in ballots and were being used to commit election fraud on a massive scale and discount votes. There is no evidence of this.
He said, should the Democrats win, martial law should be imposed to check whether the election was “rigged”.
“What I’m saying about martial law is that in the event that the nightmare scenario comes through… in the event that [the Democrats] get enough Senate seats or they get enough Senators that are compromised… at that point, Donald Trump is not going to just turn over the country again,” he said.
He added, “For America alone, he is not going to be able to just accept what comes...there would have to be martial law in the event that [Democrats] are on the way [to] taking over the country through another rigged election.”
Ticktin later told Axios that the military would need to take control of ballots and equipment to make sure that the election had not been rigged and prevent further instances of voter fraud.
“They’ll probably need to be commandeering ballots and election equipment to make sure that we can get to the bottom of it before anything further occurs,” he said.
Calls for an extraordinary intervention in the midterms have echoes of the events of January 6, 2021, when around 2,000 pro-Trump protesters stormed the Capitol in Washington, DC, following the U.S. president’s false claims of election fraud.
Trump himself has repeatedly promoted false claims about voter fraud. In 2020, ahead of his run for election as U.S. president, he said, “The only way we can lose, in my opinion, is massive fraud”, but he offered no evidence for the “illegal votes”.
Gregory Stenstrom, who testified about alleged voting irregularities in Pennsylvania in 2020, said on the call that he wanted the election paused because of security concerns.
He also suggested as an alternative that Trump could invoke the National Emergencies Act to force states to change how they run elections.
Concern that the Republicans could lose control of Congress has been increasing in recent weeks. The Democrats have raised significantly more money in key U.S. congressional races, according to recent campaign finance filings, despite Elon Musk’s record investment in the Republican political causes.