If you want to understand how democracies corrode, don’t start with tanks in the streets. Start with paperwork—drafted “orders,” pseudo-legal memos, and the reassuring claim that extraordinary power is merely a temporary necessity. That is why the Washington Post’s report today, February 26, is alarming: activists are circulating a draft executive order that would invoke an emergency and claim extraordinary presidential power over voting ahead of the November 2026 midterms. 

The proposal is misguided, legally unsound, empirically unsupported, and dangerous to the logic of self-government. 

Begin with the Constitution. The “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections are assigned to the states, subject to Congress’s power to “make or alter” those regulations. The president is not given a parallel authority to rewrite election rules by decree. That allocation is not a technical detail. It is a core safeguard against concentrated power: elections are administered through dispersed state and local systems so that no single national official can manipulate the rules to entrench himself. 

Supporters of the draft order try to evade this structure by invoking “foreign interference” as a trigger for emergency powers. But an emergency declaration does not amend the Constitution. Even in genuine crises, presidential authority remains bounded by statutes and by the separation of powers. The claim that a president can ban categories of lawful voting—such as mail ballots—or prohibit voting machines nationwide because he declares an emergency is an assertion of power the constitutional design intentionally denies. 

The empirical premise is also thin. The draft reportedly rests on allegations that China interfered with the technical administration of the 2020 election. Yet the declassified Intelligence Community Assessment on foreign threats to the 2020 election reported no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter the technical voting process—registration, casting ballots, tabulation, or reporting. On China specifically, the assessment concluded with high confidence that China “considered but did not deploy” influence efforts aimed at changing the outcome. Influence operations and propaganda are real concerns, but they are not the same as a demonstrated attack on vote counting that would justify emergency federal control of election mechanics. 

The draft’s “solution” doesn’t match the evidence. Claims of fraud via mail voting have repeatedly failed to align with available data. Research summarized by institutions across the political spectrum shows that documented mail-ballot fraud is rare, while modern vote-by-mail systems include signature verification, chain-of-custody procedures, and auditing. Likewise, jurisdictions use different types of voting machine systems, and many states pair machine tabulation with paper records and post-election audits designed to detect error or tampering. A categorical national ban is a blunt instrument aimed less at security than at reshaping who can vote and how. 

So what is the point? The draft is less a sincere governance proposal and more a strategy for shifting power over elections from the constitutional actors—states and Congress—to the hands of the incumbent executive. That is inherently destabilizing. Elections are the mechanism by which the public holds leaders accountable. When leaders seek authority to “manage” elections in their own political moment, they place the referee on the team. 

Recent history reinforces why this matters. The same administration has previously attempted to use executive action to impose election requirements, only to face substantial legal challenge and court blocks. That pattern suggests a recurring temptation: when ordinary democratic processes do not yield the desired outcome, reach for unilateral authority. 

Supporters sometimes point to a real precedent: a 2018 executive order declaring a national emergency to impose sanctions on foreign entities targeting election infrastructure, an order later extended by subsequent presidents. But that precedent underscores the difference between foreign-policy tools and domestic control. Sanctioning foreign actors is one thing; commandeering state election administration is another. The first targets external adversaries. The second targets American voters and state systems by placing them under presidential direction. 

Even if such an order were quickly struck down, the damage could be lasting. Attempting it normalizes the idea that election rules are contingent on presidential claims of crisis. It encourages partisan actors to treat emergency powers as routine instruments of electoral contestation. And it pressures state and local officials—often already working under threat—to anticipate interference from Washington rather than to administer elections impartially under state law. 

The appropriate response to election threats is not executive takeover. It is hardening infrastructure, funding cybersecurity and audits, enforcing existing criminal laws, and supporting transparency that builds public trust. That work properly involves states, Congress, and agencies operating within clear statutory limits, not a unilateral decree that tries to bypass them. 

A healthy democracy depends on a simple principle: those in power do not get to choose the rules by which the public can remove them. The reported draft executive order violates that principle. It lacks a serious legal foundation, it exaggerates or misstates the empirical record, and it advances a form of “emergency” politics that belongs to weaker democracies struggling to survive, not to a constitutional republic confident in its own restraints. Americans should reject the idea before it becomes another test of whether law can hold.

Douglas R. Sharp  is a retired Professor of theology, religion and society.