Citizen advocates are training to disrupt 2024 elections in the name of election integrity

RONKONKOMA, N.Y. ? On a Friday night in a warehouse plastered with posters of MAGA figures like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, former tax law professor David Clements demonstrated to a group of 30 people how to take over a public meeting if their election concerns aren’t being taken seriously.

“You need to focus right now on who administers your elections here, who certifies your elections,” he told the crowd, who had gathered in a warehouse repurposed as an America First social club in a suburban Long Island town.

After the 2020 election, conspiracy theorists ? with the support of former President Donald Trump ? scrambled to prove the election had been stolen. They failed. But they have used the time since to create a nationwide "election integrity" infrastructure that can be activated moving forward.

For the past four years, a network of right-wing activists and Trump allies, like Clements, has crisscrossed the country and held thousands of organizing meetings in order to create an army of tens of thousands of community activists to collect proof of alleged fraud for lawsuits or to pressure local election officials to not certify the election. In many places, their efforts have already begun with lawsuits and a flood of information requests.

The training for local activists ? held at churches, libraries and civic organizations ? largely relies on baseless claims and conspiracy theories that have been debunked in the courts, by fact checkers and independent experts, or by nonpartisan audits.

With just over a month until Election Day, Clements urged his audience to talk with local election officials about how election machines work, so they’ll consider not certifying the election results.

If they won’t listen, activists should physically take over public meetings, he said. Clements had the crowd practice putting their bodies between election officials and law enforcement.

"Everybody come forward ... get close,” he said.

This was just one of dozens of such presentations Clements ? who used to teach business law in New Mexico until his beliefs about the COVID-19 pandemic led to his firing ? has given this year ahead of the 2024 election.

Republicans hold fewer positions of power in the 2024 swing states and GOP nominee Donald Trump doesn’t appear to have the same avenue to pressure state officials that he did in 2020. Instead, experts expect county-level officials to face pressure to refuse to certify or change the election results, but they don't think it will be enough to change to election's outcome.

Many of these national right-wing election activists position this election as a battle between good and evil, and the last chance to save America.

At an April speech before about 70 people in Deer Park, Washington, Clements said that the work of the past four years was necessary to wake up Americans.

“The wave has built up over four years," he said. "Now it’s cresting and it’s about to completely obliterate all of the tyrants out there. So if courts won't and (the) legislature won't fix (it), who has to? The public.”

Keeping up with Election 2024? Sign up for USA TODAY's On Politics newsletter.

Key players include former Trump lawyer and MyPillow mogul

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment as to whether Trump or his campaign support these efforts.

Several of the national right-wing election activists are just as critical of Republican election officials as Democrats, and say their efforts aren’t about one candidate or one party.

"This isn't about Donald Trump, and this isn't about Democrats or Republicans. This is about we the people," said MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump supporter and prominent critic of election machines who created Cause for America to train activists at the county level.

There are dozens of far-right advocacy groups focused on training local election-focused activists, including True the Vote, Honest Elections Project, Precinct Strategy, The America Project, American Voters Alliance, Fight Voter Fraud and Election Transparency Initiative. They create a web of fundraising and coalition building that includes hundreds of thousands of social media followers. The local activists they have organized have then created their own coalitions at the state or county level.

The most prominent organizations are Lindell’s Cause for America and Election Integrity Network, run by former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who has vocally supported recent changes to Georgia election laws such as requiring hand-counting of ballots. Democrats have sued to block the rule.

The America Project was created by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, both of whom tried to convince Trump to issue an executive order to have the federal government seize voting machines after the 2020 election.

All three have close ties to Trump or his allies.

Though there is widespread overlap, each have found their own lanes. Lindell has focused on getting rid of election machines, while Mitchell has worked to purge voter rolls, especially of people her activists believe are not in the country legally.

Hand counting, a court fight and a QAnon follower: 3 counties to watch in 2024 election

Clements has compiled what he describes as proof of fraud in every aspect of voting, from campaign finance to how long it takes to count ballots. Doug Frank, the self-described "Johnny Appleseed" of election integrity, has held hundreds of events training activists how to identify people in their communities they believe shouldn’t be on the voter rolls through door knocking.

Frank said they don’t all necessarily know each other or work together. He said he’s never met Mitchell for example, but he’s slept on Lindell’s couch before.

“I don't think (we) all sat in the room one day and decided what we were going to do,” Frank said. ”We're not like some conspiracy.”

Several have said publicly that the four-year gap since the 2020 election allowed the “election integrity movement" to mature. Frank called it a “different chess game.”

"In 2020 we had a populace who didn't have a clue what to do, including myself," Frank said. “But now we know what to do. And so I've got teams all over the country, hundreds of them that are ready and not to mention all the other strategies.”

County activists

Most of the county-level “election integrity” or “fair elections” groups that have formed since 2020, work with a mix of the national groups, and increasingly with each other.

Holly Kesler, Georgia state director for Citizens Defending Freedom, said on an Oct. 6 Twitter broadcast hosted by the America Project that they've seen more success since the leaders of several Georgia groups got together in June 2023 to strategize. Those wins include a new rule from the Georgia State Election Board that requires three separate individuals in each of Georgia's 2,400 voting precincts to hand count the ballots before the county deadline to certify election results. 

“We all have our own lanes and things that we're doing or things we have been doing for a long time, and so we're comfortable in those lanes, but it's high time we all get on the same highway and we start cruising down the same highway together,” Kesler said.

The training can include how to question the accuracy of the voter rolls, how to petition local officials to get rid of voting machines in favor of hand counting ballots, and how poll watchers can file reports that could potentially be used in lawsuits over the results.

How the trainings are being used on the ground

Some of that training has already been put to work. Multiple states face lawsuits over the makeup of the voter rolls, several counties have stopped using electronic voting machines or chose to count all ballots by hand. Nine Republican-led states have backed out of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC ? the bipartisan, cross-state partnership meant to clean voter rolls ? after the far right targeted it with conspiracy theories.

Clements' trainings begin with a two-hour movie that claims that rigged elections are a new form of American slavery. Part autobiography, part cartoon, the film, which he said he is giving away for free online because his distributor dropped him in fear of lawsuits, calls people in prison for the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol political prisoners and claims that a “uniparty” controlling Washington knows election fraud exists and doesn’t care.

Clements calls his efforts “Gideon 300,” after the biblical figure Gideon, who defeated a Midianite army using just 300 men.

In the film, Clements told an audience to surround the “feckless politicians” and “usurpers” who run elections.

“Almost imagine, as if you're looking over a map, you've got your county; election workers, canvassing boards, clerks that have broken their trust with you. You will surround them,” Clements said. “Can you find 300 of God's warriors surrounding the 10 feckless usurpers, to show up and proclaim truth? ... Do not die on the altar of civility, but become an abolitionist and stay there, expose them and see your power.”

Frank, whose focus is on local voter rolls, told USA TODAY he’s given his presentation 650 times since 2020. He helped local activists convince Shasta County, California, election officials to stop using machines to count ballots.

He said that his teams have several plans in place to identify potential election fraud on or around Election Day. One plan is to conduct penetration tests, in which a hacker tries to get remote access to machines, in several jurisdictions, including in Missouri and Nebraska.

'They can vote out the computers'

Lindell and Mitchell have focused more on organizing activists digitally.

Training for Lindell's Cause of America includes how to report alleged irregularities to his groups.

He told USA TODAY that local activists are best positioned to impact local elections operations.

“They can vote out the computers. They can vote it out at the county level,” he said.

Mitchell’s organizations, Election Integrity Network and Only Citizens Vote Coalition, focus on building state-level coalitions. They hold weekly and monthly online meetings to coordinate efforts on issues like vote by mail, legislation, election technology, stopping ranked-choice voting and cleaning up voter rolls. These calls are not open to the media and are labeled as off the record.

In a July 2023 podcast hosted by Mitchell, Kerri Toloczko the executive director of the Election Integrity Network said they have organized tens of thousands of “election integrity patriots” across the country.

Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment.

County officials respond

Some election officials say the county level activists have been helpful, while others say they create a nuisance. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, they’ve helped identify voters with duplicate registrations, City Clerk Joel Hondrop told USA TODAY.

But in Los Angeles, they’ve swamped election officials with public information requests and questions.

“I think what they're trying to do is lay the groundwork to contest the election,” said Dean Logan, Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. “It's sort of like, if things don't go the way we want them to, we want to know where can we try to poke holes in the process.”

Durham County, North Carolina, Director of Elections Derek Bowen said the local groups have created an avalanche of public information requests asking for voter data, registration lists or the political preferences of poll workers.

“We're responding to them consistent with North Carolina law, and we're happy to do so from a transparency perspective to the extent that it does not prevent us from doing the actual work of elections,” Bowen, who was appointed to the position in 2017, said. “Sometimes it could be perceived that it's intended to act as a blockade to us actually doing the election administration work.”

Bowen said he expects local pressure to ramp up after the election, depending on the winner.

“Once we release unofficial results, once news media make their projections about who is going to win, that's when in a swing state such as North Carolina ... that's when you will see intense pressure from outside groups depending on who wins,” Bowen said. “That is actually going to be the most stressful part of this whole election.”

Sowing new doubts

Election officials also spent four years preparing for attempts to challenge the 2024 election, said Michael Waldman, President of NYU's Brennan Center for Justice.

"That same election denial impulse (that existed in 2020) is far more organized, far more strategic and far better funded ? and now is something that tens of millions of people believe and share," Waldman said. "At the same time, the election system itself is far better able, we believe, to handle something like this."

Activists successfully pressured some county officials not to certify the 2022 midterm results in states including Arizona, New Mexico and North Carolina, but those officials backed down when ordered to certify by the state or the courts. Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who helped write the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, expects resistance in 2024 to be short lived.

“The law doesn't make refusal to certify an option,” he said. “When these delays have come, county attorneys, state attorneys, courts have all uniformly said, 'Actually, the thing you're doing isn't an option, so either you do it or we'll make you do it, or we'll put you in jail.' And hearing, 'are you willing to go to jail for this, though?' is sobering.”

His concern, though, is that social unrest could come from lawsuits or a fight over certification.

“I have no doubt that there will be lots and lots and lots of noise in the meantime,” Levitt said. “That noise is going to be disturbing to everybody watching, but I'm very confident it won't actually change the result.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 2024 election disruption: 'integrity activists' prepare for a battle