Thousands of U.S. citizens concerned about Donald Trump-alleged election fraud have been trained by MAGA-aligned figures on how to spot and fight it ahead of the imminent presidential election, an investigation claims.
Dozens of far-right election advocacy groups have visited communities across the country to hold seminars and training sessions intended to motivate average voters to monitor their local election offices, USA Today reports.
Among the leaders conducting such meetings is former professor David Clements, who has elevated Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and suggested that future elections are compromised.
Clements, who says he was fired from his university job in 2021 for refusing to comply with a Covid-19 mask mandate, uses conspiracy theories and Christian nationalist ideas to promote election denialism. He and his wife, Erin Clements, are notable election deniers.
In local communities, Clements hosts “Gideon 300” meetings where he shows fellow election deniers a two-hour-long video that uses slavery as an analogy for election fraud and promotes unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about methods of voter fraud.
In one series of animations, the “documentary” alleges that President Joe Biden and other Democrats won their elections with “pre-filled” ballots “produced out of thin air” by voting machines.
It goes on to claim that these ballots are then sent to non-government organization headquarters and picked up by “ballot mules” which then drop them off at ballot boxes paid for by Mark Zuckerberg – the founder and CEO of Meta.
There is no evidence of this.
Much of the video attacks voting tabulation machines, mainly Dominion Voting Systems machines, as “proprietary machines” programmed to “steal, shuffle, dilute and plunder” votes.
That claim is made despite Dominion taking those false allegations to court, aggressively defending itself and eventually settling for a whopping $787.5 million.
Multiple investigations have found no evidence Dominion voting machines were tampered with by a foreign entity or tampered with to switch votes.
The video, which has been viewed at least 50,000 times, ends by encouraging people to “surround” their county election workers and canvassers and “fight”.
Clements’s efforts are just one part of a larger movement to radicalize and incentivize citizens to take action by watching their local election officials conduct the election.
More notable Trump-aligned figures like Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and lawyer and election denier Cleta Mitchell have also trained citizens to look for election fraud.
The training encourages citizens to watch their local election officials closely and report any hint of skepticism. All of it is based on lies Trump and his allies espoused after the 2020 election in an attempt to get the election results overturned in Trump’s favor.
Election workers across the country are being warned to prepare for aggressive pushback, depending on how Election Day results go. Already, local election officials have taken steps to try and establish trust between them and voters – offering public tours, instilling GPS monitoring on voting machines and more.
But no matter how much transparency and accuracy election workers do, their efforts may still be challenged depending out the outcome.
“Candidates who think they’re going to lose start doing the work… to delegitimize a process that likely won’t deliver them a victory,” David Becker, the founder and director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said in a call to reporters on Tuesday.
