Christian group uses ‘Trojan horse’ to recruit election skeptics as US poll workers | 2024 US election

Christian political activists are teaming up with charismatic preachers to use tours of battleground states in support of Donald Trump to register election skeptics as poll workers across the country and rally support for the effort.

Joshua Standifer, who leads a group called Lions of Judah, described the effort as a “Trojan Horse” strategy, saying on his website that putting Christians in “key, influential positions in government, like election staff” would identify suspected voter fraud and be “the first step to victory this fall.”

Standifer has been touring pro-Trump tent rallies, featuring self-proclaimed prophets and Christian nationalist preachers, in key battleground states including Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

He describes himself as a former Republican opposition pollster who began on his own path after receiving a message from God to get Christians involved in politics.

“(God) said, ‘Start an organization called Lions of Judah. ​​Start a 501c4 and go out and help me become one,'” Standifer told a crowd at a college tour in Wisconsin earlier this month. Lions of Judah was incorporated in Tennessee as a nonprofit in 2021, according to Tennessee business records.

The group’s website highlights Trump and his false claims that the 2020 election was rife with fraud, promising to “unleash the cries of Christian voters across America” ​​by directly involving them in the electoral process. Lion of Judah’s election worker training program, reviewed by The Guardian, includes a series of modules titled “Fighting Fraud: How to Become an Election Worker in 4 Easy Steps!”

Standifer’s project has so far gone largely unnoticed.

Matthew Taylor, a research fellow at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, wrote in a post on X that he was concerned the effort could cause chaos during the election, describing it as “an urgent and unrecognized danger to democracy this fall.” “It only takes one or two people to come forward and say, ‘we’ve found election fraud,’ and provide dubious evidence to throw an incredible amount of sand into the cogs of the vote-counting process,” he told The Guardian.

Standifer strongly rejected the idea that the group posed a threat to the electoral process, saying he founded it to enable Christians to participate in politics, not to sow doubt about elections.

“We don’t tolerate that,” Standifer said, adding that he thought the anxiety over his project was an example of anti-Christian sentiment. “I feel like there’s a growing prejudice against Christians, and I want to push back against it, because it’s almost offensive. If it were like any other religion, I don’t think there would be any resistance.”

Yet nonpartisanship is not a consideration in the training for aspiring election workers. In the first part of the course, participants are told that being a Christian election worker is “the first step to victory this fall.” As election workers, the course promises, believers can play a direct role in identifying and reporting irregularities in the process in real time.

Speaking in Wisconsin during his Courage Tour, Standifer called the strategy a “Trojan horse” that includes an element of surprise. “They don’t expect it,” Standifer told the audience. He reiterated the value of being as involved as possible in the electoral process, saying simply volunteering as a poll watcher doesn’t give you much access. Standifer told the Guardian that Lions of Judah had recruited election workers in all battleground states but declined to say how many they had registered.

While voter fraud — for example, a voter voting under someone else’s name or voting in two states — is extremely rare, Standifer’s show highlighted unfounded claims that voter fraud is a persistent problem and repeated Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election.

“It is important that as election staff, you carefully and proactively identify and report suspicious activity that may undermine the integrity of our elections,” reads text from a training module titled “Addressing Fraud in Real Time.” The training urges staff who witness “suspicious or fraudulent activity” to first report it to the Lion of Judah’s “Fraud Hotline” and then to local authorities.

“The fact that they were instructed to share ‘evidence’ of this with Lion of Judah prior to contacting state authorities to report it, I think indicates at the very least a great deal of nefarious intent on their part, or a conspiratorial desire to undermine the outcome of the election,” Taylor said.

The Lion of Judah training program reflects a broader effort by the Trump campaign and its allies to place doubtful Trump supporters into key positions in the 2024 presidential election. The Republican National Committee (RNC), chaired by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, announced plans to recruit 100,000 poll watchers earlier this year as part of its “Election Integrity Plan.” While there is no evidence that the RNC has been able to recruit the large numbers of poll watchers it promised, election experts and voting rights groups worry the effort could still sow doubt and intimidate voters.

Meanwhile in Georgia, conservative members of the State Election Board have worked closely with anti-election activists to change the rules governing the state’s elections to make it easier for local officials to challenge the results.

During the Courage Tour, Standifer encouraged participants to imagine the possible impact.

“Imagine this: It’s election night. There’s chaos. Polls are closed. Volunteers are turned away,” Standifer said. “But what happens when the people actually counting the votes in a battleground state like Wisconsin are Christians across America?”