Christian group recruits ‘Trojan horse’ election skeptics as US poll workers
Lion of Judah enrolls poll workers in Trump-aligned swing state tour, which experts say could be ‘hazard to democracy’
A Christian political operative has teamed up with charismatic preachers to enroll election skeptics as poll workers across the country, using a Donald Trump-aligned swing state tour to enlist support in the effort.
Joshua Standifer, who leads the group called Lion of Judah, describes the effort as a “Trojan horse” strategy to get Christians in “key positions of influence in government like Election Workers”, which will help them identify alleged voter fraud and serve as “the first step on the path to victory this Fall”, according to his website.
Standifer has been on the road with a traveling pro-Trump tent revival featuring self-styled prophets and Christian nationalist preachers that has made stops in key swing states including Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.
He describes himself as a former Republican opposition researcher who struck out on his own after receiving a message from God to involve Christians in politics.
“[God] said, ‘start a group called the Lion of Judah. Start a 501c4, get out there, and help my body come together as one,’” Standifer told a crowd at the Courage Tour in Wisconsin earlier this month. According to Tennessee business records, Lion of Judah was incorporated there in 2021 as a non-profit organization.
The group’s website, which prominently features Trump and his false claim that the 2020 election was rife with fraud, promises to “release the ROAR of Christian Voters across America” by getting them directly involved with the electoral process. The Lion of Judah’s election worker training program, which the Guardian has reviewed, features a series of modules titled “Fight The Fraud: How To Become An Election Worker In 4 Easy Steps!”
Standifer’s project has so far largely flown under the radar.
Matthew Taylor, a researcher with the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, described the effort in a post on X as a “urgent & unrecognized hazard to our democracy this fall” and said he worried it had the potential to sow chaos during the election. “All it takes is one or two of those people coming forward and saying, ‘Hey, I found election fraud’ and presenting dubious evidence to throw an amazing amount of sand in the gears of the vote counting process,” he told the Guardian.
Standifer vehemently rejected the idea that the organization poses a threat to the electoral process and said he founded the group to empower Christians to participate in politics – not to sow doubts in elections.
“We don’t stand for things like that,” said Standifer, who said he viewed anxieties about his project as an example of anti-Christian sentiment. “I want to speak against the rise, I feel like, of bigotry towards Christians that’s happening, because it’s almost offensive. You know that if this was like any other faith, I don’t think there’s pushback.”
Still, the training for aspiring election workers makes no attempt at non-partisanship. In the first section of the course, participants are told that having Christians serving as election workers will form “the first step on the path to victory this Fall”. As poll workers, the course promises, believers will be able to play a direct role in identifying and reporting irregularities in the process in real time.
During his speech at the Wisconsin stop of the Courage Tour, Standifer referred to this strategy as “a Trojan horse” involving an element of surprise. “They don’t see it coming,” Standifer told the crowd. He repeatedly noted the value of getting as deeply involved in the electoral process as possible, noting that simply volunteering as a poll watcher would not grant them as much access. Standifer told the Guardian that Lion of Judah had recruited election workers in all of the swing states but declined to share how many people it had signed up.
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Although voter fraud – for example, a voter casting a ballot under someone else’s name, or in two states – is exceedingly rare, Standifer’s program emphasizes the unfounded claim that fraudulent voting is a persistent problem and echoes Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election.
“As an Election Worker, it is important to be vigilant and proactive in identifying and reporting any suspicious activities that may compromise the fairness of the election,” reads the text of a training module titled “Handling Fraud in Real Time”. The training urges workers who have witnessed “suspicious activities or irregularities” to report them first to the Lion of Judah’s “fraud hotline” and then to their local authorities.
“The fact that they are instructed to share the ‘evidence’ of this with Lion of Judah before they reach out to state authorities and report it signals, I think, at the very least, a good deal of bad faith on their part, if not almost a conspiratorial desire to undermine the results of the election,” Taylor said.
The Lion of Judah training program reflects a broad push, by the Trump campaign and its allies, to insert election-doubting Trump supporters into key roles during the 2024 presidential election. The Republican National Committee (RNC), which is chaired by Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, announced earlier this year that it planned to recruit 100,000 poll watchers as part of its “election integrity plan”. There is no evidence that the RNC has managed to recruit the army of poll watchers they have promised, but election experts and voting rights groups worry the effort could still sow doubt and intimidate voters.
“Just imagine: it’s election night. Chaos is happening. The polls are closing – they go and volunteers are getting kicked out,” said Standifer. “But what if we had Christians across America, in swing states like Wisconsin, that were actually the ones counting the votes?”
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