David Clements: The Evangelist of Election Refusal

In the final moments of the training exercise, dozens of people surrounded a woman who was shouting about defective voting machines. 

They were shielding her from a sheriff’s deputy—or, rather, a man assigned to play the role of a sheriff’s deputy—who was trying to evict her from the faux event.

The trainees had been instructed that American elections are rigged and that they are battling a “spiritual war” against election fraud. They had been told that they could resist “tyranny” by showing up en masse to pressure local officials to withhold certification of voting machines or election results.

And at this climactic moment, at the direction of a former business law professor named David Clements, they were role-playing large-scale civil disobedience at a local elections meeting, crowding around a fellow comrade-in-arms to physically block law enforcement from removing her from a public meeting at which she was filibustering. 

Later, Clements assured trainees that this is the only way to fight back: “You have to create a righteous, sober-minded, well-spoken, articulate mob, if you will, because that’s the only thing that will work short of where we’re headed, which is a kinetic civil war—if we don’t get this resolved peacefully.”

This scene unfolded during a day-long “election integrity” training event held in September inside the worship center at Grace Covenant church in Hogansville, Georgia, a small town in the westernmost part of the state. But thousands of people across the country have attended similar training sessions hosted by the former professor. The traveling event series has been billed as the “Gideon 300” tour—a reference to the biblical story of 300 men who faced an army of 135,000 and won. 

Clements has described the “Gideon 300” project as an effort to mobilize 300 or more “warriors” in each county in the United States, meaning people who are willing to show up in large numbers at local elections meetings to speak against certification and who aren’t afraid “to die” or “to be arrested.” These “warriors,” Clements has said, must demand that local officials withhold certification of voting machines or election results. “Gideon 300” trainings typically involve a simulation of a county election board meeting, in which Clements demonstrates what the crowd should do if local officials won’t listen: hijack the public meeting by physically occupying the space, getting control of the microphone, and not giving it up based on what he believes to be “arbitrary” time limits put on speakers. 

The “Gideon 300” tour is not the first time Clements has criss-crossed the country to evangelize about purported election fraud. He set out to persuade local officials to refuse certification long before the upcoming election, as the Washington Post and Reuters reported in 2022. Yet his recent activities have largely escaped notice in the lead-up to the Nov. 5 presidential election, even as commentators have sounded the alarm about the prospect that county officials in Georgia or elsewhere might refuse to certify the election. Withholding certification of election results at the local level is not lawful, and it is unlikely to work as a means of preventing the winner from taking office. That said, it could have destructive effects, sparking post-election chaos, misinformation, and possibly violence.

Lawfare reviewed dozens of photos, videos, and audio recordings of Clements as he has traveled from town to town across the country, simulating election certification meetings at which scores of people confront local officials and pressure them to withhold certification.

Last month, Lawfare also attended one of Clements’s trainings in Hogansville, where the charismatic lawyer used a combination of religion and conspiracy theories to promote lawlessness ahead of the upcoming election—lawlessness both on the part of the election officials whom Clements wants to refuse to certify results, and on the part of the “mob” he is training to pressure them.

In a lengthy interview on Oct. 29, Clements denied that he is encouraging lawlessness, much less violence. He insisted that local officials do, in fact, have the authority to withhold certification in the presence of suspected fraud; that all of the tactics he is teaching at his trainings are First Amendment-protected speech; that natural law theory countenances violations of mere state law to the extent that the latter infringes on fundamental human rights; that the risk of violence by police against him and other protesters far exceeds the risk of violence by the people he is training; and that police violence justifies uses of force by protesters.

“Here we are six days from the most consequential election of my lifetime,” Clements said during the interview. “And everyone’s preparing themselves for what could be a very, very kinetic situation in the months leading up to certification. And all of my efforts have not been to escalate rhetoric. It’s actually to diffuse, talk, use our words.”

But while insisting on their legality, Clements also acknowledged that his tactics might push the line in some instances and are, among other things, designed to set up challenges to restrictions on speech.

“In order to actually challenge these things in a court of law, you have to test the limits of where does the First Amendment start and stop,” he argued, “in order to communicate, I think, these concepts that have to be communicated.”

Clements agreed to speak on the condition that the interview be recorded and released in its entirety, noting by email in response to Lawfare’s request that, “Thus far, USA Today, Washington Post, NBC, and many others have been instructed not to go on record with me for a fully transparent interview.”

Full audio of the nearly-two hour interview is available here: 

“Civil disobedience right up to the edge” 

Clements’s September event in Hogansville was not a one-shot deal. It was part of a string of such events across major swing states and elsewhere, all focused on the same thing: getting local election officials to refuse to certify voting machines or election results. 

Since Jan. 1, 2024, Clements has brought his “Gideon 300” events to at least 40 counties across more than a dozen states, including counties in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, according to a Lawfare review of events advertised on public social media posts. But he began evangelizing against local certification processes long before 2024. As early as July 2022, an NPR analysis reported that he had appeared at 62 events across 25 states since Jan. 6, 2021. 

Asked about how many such events he has done, Clements said he has lost track because he has done so many of them.

Caption: Clements posts a photo of a “Gideon 300” training in the swing state of North Carolina. Source: Facebook/David Clements. 

Caption: On Telegram, Clements shares a photo of a Gideon 300 training he conducted in Crawford County, Michigan. Source: Telegram/David Clements. 

Clements secured his first major success as an election fraud agitator in 2022, when he persuaded commissioners in rural Otero County, New Mexico, to withhold certification of the state’s June primary results, citing alleged defects with the voting machines there. The victory was short-lived, with two commissioners who had voted not to certify later changing course after the state’s Supreme Court intervened and ordered the commissioners to fulfill their statutory duty to do so. But it solidified Clements’s reputation as a leading “election integrity” activist.

His rising profile within the election denial movement has coincided with unprecedented efforts to delay or obstruct certification at the local level. A recent report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) identified more than 30 examples of county officials who, since 2020, have voted to deny or delay certifying elections based on false claims of voter fraud or irregularities. According to the report, some of those officials include “avowed 2020 election deniers” and “individuals who acted as fake presidential electors for Donald Trump.”

Nowhere has the politicization of certification processes been more acutely felt than in Georgia. Back in August, a Trump-aligned majority of the State Election Board sparked controversy when it approved rule changes related to the certification process at the county level. The most controversial of those redefined what it means to “certify” an election, adding a new requirement that county boards conduct an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results. Critics of the rule worried that it could be used as a pretext to delay or outright obstruct certification of Georgia’s election results. Doing so would be unlawful, at least as the law has been articulated in decades of case law, and the rule changes were recently enjoined by order of Judge Thomas Cox, meaning that they will not go into effect before the 2024 election. Still, the controversy raised concerns in Georgia that local officials who do not like the results of the election might delay or outright refuse certification as a kind of protest against purported election fraud. 

Even before the State Election Board rule changes, county-level certification disputes had become an increasingly contentious issue in Georgia. According to an Atlanta-Journal Constitution survey, at least 19 election board members across nine Georgia counties have objected to certifying elections during the past four years. In most instances, officials who refused to certify did not cite any specific instances of wrongdoing or outcome-determinative fraud. Instead, they pointed to lack of confidence in voting machines, the need to review additional election-related documentation, or generalized concerns about ballot drop-boxes.

Clements has given speeches or conducted trainings in at least six counties in Georgia over the course of the past three years: Cherokee, Fulton, Chatham, Forsyth, Fayette, and Troup. His appearances in the Peach State have drawn sizable crowds. In March, he packed a theater in Roswell, Georgia, for a film screening and “Gideon 300” training. Before that, in September 2022, more than 100 people showed up to hear him address the county commission in Cherokee County, where he elicited applause after he demanded that officials refuse to certify future elections. 

Caption: Clements packs a theater in Roswell, Georgia, for a “Gideon 300” training. Source: Facebook/David Clements. 

The day after his appearance in Cherokee County, Clements was in Forsyth County, where he urged the audience to pressure local election officials. “There needs to be a point where we have that ‘emperor has no clothes’ moment, where when we show up in mass—this whole group shows up—and that they are undone, that they are naked before you. And the gig that they thought was sweet is a curse. That’s the attitude,” he said. “And I’m talking about we take civil disobedience right up to the edge, because we have to.”

Asked in his interview with Lawfare about his impact on the policymaking process in Georgia, Clements said that he has not knowingly had direct contact with two specific election officials in the state who have spearheaded certification refusals, and he said that he doesn’t know whether any policymakers have attended his Gideon 300 trainings. But he did not exclude the possibility that election officials in Georgia—either locally or on the State Election Board—have been influenced by his advocacy. And he’s clearly delighted by the direction the state has gone. 

“What I love about what’s going on in Georgia ... is that you’ll notice that none of it even requires a show of force because there’s a partnership between the election officials working in concert with their constituents,” he said. “And I think that’s much healthier.”

But Clements is preparing for the less healthy options too.

“Ain’t no devil gonna tread on me”

The parking lot was nearly full on Sept. 21 at Grace Covenant, a modest church nestled atop a swath of green pasture just off Highway 85 in Hogansville. The tiny town of Hogansville—population: 3, 227—is in Troup County, a region in the westernmost part of the state that shares a border with Alabama. Despite the small size of both the church and the town, and despite its being a warm Saturday afternoon during football season in the South, Clements had attracted a sizable crowd. Inside the sparsely decorated sanctuary hall, more than 80 people were gathered to hear him espouse the gospel of election fraud.

Two of those people were notables: Garland and Tamara Favorito, a married couple who run an election integrity nonprofit called VoterGA. VoterGA has become increasingly influential in Georgia since 2020, when it got involved in efforts to prove that the presidential election had been stolen. As CNN recently reported, the group pushed for several of the recent rule changes by the State Election Board and has a history of pushing debunked election misinformation. The couple also have a history with Clements, having hosted an event with him in Fayetteville last year. So it was no surprise to see them at his “Gideon 300” training in Hogansville. 

Caption: Garland Favorito and Tamara Favorito at an event with David Clements in Fayetteville, Georgia, last year. Source: Facebook/Holly Michelle Kesler. 

The event kicked off with worship music. “We’re all here because we believe in Jesus,” said the six-person band’s frontman, a young man in flip flops and cargo shorts. “We’re especially here at this event because we’re trying to fight back. So, this is a little bit of a fight song.” 

Audience members rose to their feet, clapping along as the band began to play. “He’s choking on the blood that ran down the tree,” they sang in unison. “Ain’t no devil gonna tread on me.”

The event’s organizer, a woman named April Loftin, climbed onto the dais to deliver an opening prayer. Loftin, a hair stylist, made an unsuccessful bid for a seat on the Troup County commission last spring. Her campaign advocated for “complete removal of Dominion voting systems in Troup County and the state of GA.” Now, praying aloud in the worship space at Grace Covenant, she asked God to save the nation. “We come to you as a new Gideon’s Army,” she said, her voice rising. “Defeat the enemy that is destroying our country,” she pleaded.

As people in the crowd shouted “amen,” Clements sprang to his feet and joined Loftin on the dais, eliciting a round of raucous applause. Clements, who has called himself an “unemployed professor,” certainly looked the part: skinny jeans, rumpled green blazer, mop of graying hair. And he is, in fact, an attorney and former law professor. He described his professional history in the Lawfare interview as that of a former prosecutor who has presented scientific evidence and expert witnesses before courts. He said he also developed both “expertise” in election law and a good generalist knowledge of voting systems, even though he had no training or experience related to election systems prior to 2021.

In the church that evening, however, Clements’s rhetorical style was more pastoral than professorial or lawyerly. In his podcast appearances and public speeches, he tends to emulate some of the most influential preachers in far-right American evangelicalism, portraying the world of election systems as a matter of good versus evil. Much of his rhetoric mixes religious faith with conspiratorial thinking, political resentment, grievance-based nationalism, and apocalyptic eschatology.

That rhetoric was certainly on display in Hogansville, where Clements compared the use of voting machines to slavery. “Whether you want to admit it or not, legal violence is going to be committed against you through using these enslavement devices,” he said. He told the audience that it is time to decide whether they will succumb to tyranny. “We are in a spiritual war,” he said. “My hope for today is that you’re gonna feel more solid, more grounded, more connected to your community. And you’ll have a prescription to finally fight back.”

Clements’s account of how we got here—and how he got here—is told through a documentary called “Let My People Go,” which he co-produced with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow.com CEO, who is a prominent election conspiracy theorist. Introducing the film at Grace Covenant, Clements explained that it premiered last December. On that same day, he said, a jury in Washington, D.C., returned a $148 million dollar damages verdict against Rudy Giuliani “for telling the truth about two particular election workers in Georgia by the name of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.”

He was alluding to the defamation suit Freeman and Moss brought against Giuliani, who falsely accused the women of committing election fraud during the 2020 election. Giuliani’s lies about the election workers resulted in a cascade of death threats and harassment against them. And in the defamation litigation, Giuiliani did not contest that the statements were false and defamatory and caused damage. But in Hogansville, Clements’s insistence that Giuliani was telling the truth found a receptive audience. When he told the crowd that Freeman and Moss “were part of a much larger scheme to defraud you of your voices,” a woman in the audience piped up: “Amen!”

It was a prelude of what was to come in “Let My People Go.” In the film, Clements and a parade of what he terms “experts” assert a potpourri of false or misleading claims about widespread electoral fraud, from ballot stuffing to vote flipping to malicious algorithms manipulated by voting machine companies. The film sets out each of these claims in support of a broader narrative thread: The 2020 election was stolen from Trump; Joe Biden is an illegitimate “usurper”; individuals who participated in the Jan. 6 attack were set up by the government and have been wrongly imprisoned as a result; and Americans in every county must fight back to abolish the machines. 

In one scene, Clements addresses a group of people assembled at a ranch in Missouri for the “Second Annual J6 Family Retreat.” He tells them that “the J6ers” should be pardoned. The only “J6ers” who don’t deserve pardons, he says, are the “unindicted fed co-conspirators,” who “should be tried for treason.” In the audience at Grace Covenant, several people nodded their heads in agreement at this. A woman seated on the front row raised a wad of tissues to her face, wiping away tears.

“Let My People Go” is a film about alleged election fraud, but it’s also a film about Clements, who narrates the story of his conversion from award-winning professor to traveling election fraud evangelist. Describing himself as a “trailer park kid who came from nothing,” Clements recalls his time teaching business law at New Mexico State University, where he taught until 2021. That fall, Clements says he was fired from his job over his refusal to comply with the school’s COVID-19 safety requirements, which mandated that faculty get vaccinations or regular tests. 

Out of work and facing multiple professional bar complaints before the New Mexico Supreme Court, Clements began podcasting out of his garage, interviewing supposed “experts” and “fact witnesses” about America’s “clearly rigged” elections. Soon enough, Clements and his wife, Erin, were traveling around the country to “shout from the rooftops” about the “stolen election.” By Clements’s estimation in the film, the two have delivered more than 200 “evidentiary presentations” about election fraud across 47 states. 

Throughout the film, Clements portrays himself as a kind of modern-day Job, a man who has lost everything and suffered much yet who remains steadfast in his faith—whether that faith be in God or widespread election fraud in the United States. He makes a point of giving the cameras a tour of the modest home he shares with his wife and three children in New Mexico, where he shows viewers the broken window on his old Buick and the rickety ceiling fan in his bedroom and the holes in the blazers hanging in his closet. 

But for all that Clements reveals about himself in the film, he omits important details too. He speaks of rigged elections, but he leaves out his own bitter personal experience running for political office, having once made a failed bid in the 2014 Republican primary for U.S. Senate in New Mexico—a loss he blamed at the time on his political rival’s campaign manager, alleging that the manager hacked his email and sent supporters messages to drive them away. The campaign manager sued for defamation, and the two later settled the suit. 

In his interview with Lawfare, Clements described the experience as, in retrospect, a formative one with respect to voting equipment. Sudden shifts in vote tallies with new Dominion machines, he said, seemed weird to him at the time, but he brushed the concerns aside because he believed in the system. Only after 2020 did he look back and wonder if his own election was rigged.

Dominion has repeatedly denied that its machines were manipulated during the 2020 election, and there is no credible evidence of widespread irregularities or “flipped” votes for Joe Biden. Last year, the company brought a defamation suit against Fox News, alleging that the conservative TV network aired falsehoods about the voting machine company, including claims similar to those promoted by Clements. Fox settled the suit for a staggering figure of $787.5 million after a judge granted partial summary judgment to Dominion on the issue of falsity, writing that “the evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that [it] is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”

Clements sports other contradictions too. He presents himself in the film as a peaceful, God-fearing Christian, but he doesn’t mention that he has argued that Dominion Voting Systems executives should be tried for treason and executed by firing squad or hangings. 

Asked about these comments during his Lawfare interview, Clements insisted that he has not called for their killing, merely “pointed out the penalty” for the crime of treason. He said he does not believe that all “garden variety election workers” have engaged in treasonous conduct warranting execution. But he maintained that some voting system executives, such as Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos, should be put to death after being afforded due process and following the return of a guilty verdict for treason. “In my legal opinion, if I were to bring this before a military tribunal or otherwise, I would make a closing argument that this person is deserving of whatever penalty is attendant to treason,” he said. “And I make no apologies for that.”

In response to Lawfare’s request for comment about Clements’s remarks, Dominion said allegations that its employees have tried to interfere with any election are completely false. “This is yet another example of how lies about Dominion have damaged our company, subjected officials and Dominion employees to harassment, and baselessly diminished the public's faith in elections,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement.

“Dominion's certified systems remain secure, and we are confident in the security of future elections. We strongly encourage people to rely upon verified, credible sources of election information—sources that can explain the many layers of physical, operational, and technical safeguards that exist to protect the integrity of our elections, including use of paper ballots for auditing and recounts. We remain fully prepared to defend our company and our customers against lies and to seek accountability from those who spread them." 

Caption: On Twitter, now X, Clements says that Dominion Voting Systems employees have committed treason and should face the “legally mandated penalty of a rope.” The post has garnered more than 2,000 “likes.” 

Though Clements suggests in the film that he has fallen on hard times since he lost his job as a law professor, he is not without forms of financial support. A crowdfunding campaign to support him after he lost his professorship has raised more than $300,000 since it was created in August 2021—a sum he described in his interview with Lawfare as “more money in the bank than I’ve ever had in my entire life.” He said he uses this money only to “advocate for the J6ers” and to “get to the bottom of what happened with 2020.”

Nor does “Let My People Go” acknowledge that Clements has achieved something most academics never do: proximity to fame and power. Within months of his introduction to the election denial scene, he had appeared on Tucker Carlson, interviewed Sidney Powell on his Rumble channel, and posted a photo of himself with Trump after they dined together at Bedminster, where Clements says the former president asked him for his opinion on the “legal environment” surrounding 2020 election litigation. These days, Clements is a MAGA celebrity in his own right, making regular appearances on the popular “Conservative Daily Podcast” and having amassed more than 65,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel. 

Caption: David Clements posts a photo with Trump in Bedminster, New Jersey. Clements told Lawfare that Trump asked for his opinion on the “legal environment” surrounding litigation claiming that the 2020 election had been affected by fraud. The meeting between Clements and Trump in August 2021 occurred more than five months after Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States. 

“Let My People Go” concludes with what is supposed to be a rousing call to action by Clements, who urges viewers to show up at local meetings and “surround” election workers. “Election workers, canvassing boards, clerks that have broken their trust with you, you will surround them. Can you find 300 of God’s warriors surrounding the 10 feckless usurpers?” he asks. “Do not die on the altar of civility,” he commands. “Become an abolitionist.” 

The lights came on inside the worship hall as the credits began to roll upward on the screen in Hogansville. The first name to appear was a familiar one: Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was fatally shot by law enforcement during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “Let My People Go,” as it turned out, had swapped out the usual closing credits for a list of people who were indicted, incarcerated, or killed for participating in the Jan. 6 attack.

While the credits rolled, Clements invited the audience to rise for a standing ovation. And they did so enthusiastically. They applauded for Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers, who has been convicted of seditious conspiracy; for Julian Khater, who pleaded guilty after assaulting three police officers with pepper spray, including an officer who died the next day after suffering two strokes; and for Guy Reffitt, who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 with a .40-caliber pistol on his belt—all of whose names scrolled up the screen.

“Gideon 300”

The standing ovation for people who have been accused or convicted of crimes committed during the Jan. 6 attack on the nation’s capitol subsided after about 10 minutes.

By this point, nearly three hours had passed. The crowd was noticeably thinner, but more than 50 people remained. Over the past few hours, they had watched “Let My People Go” with rapt attention, gasping with outrage or shaking their heads in disgust at each allegation of rigged voting machines or widespread fraud—allegations that have elsewhere been shown to be false, misleading, or baseless. It was now time for Clements to tell the crowd what they can do about it all—in November and beyond. 

Pacing in front of an Appeal to Heaven flag strung up on the altar behind him, Clements encouraged his audience to confront local election officials about their “maladministration” and the use of “defective” machines. “You have grounds to say, ‘Board, you better not certify this process, this vote, or those machines,’” he said. The key to achieving victories, he explained further, is to show up “in mass, with numbers” at county elections meetings.

To demonstrate how it will work in practice, Clements simulated a local board elections meeting in Troup County, the region where Hogansville is located. He selected two women—one clad in an American flag button-down, the other in a “Trump Girl!” T-shirt—to play the role of elections officials. A man near the door was assigned to act as a stand-in for the sheriff’s deputy. Then Clements scanned the crowd for another volunteer. “I need one great soul who really hates these election devices to come up,” he said. A woman waved her hand in the air, eager to be cast as a concerned citizen who despises voting machines. She got the part.

During the role-play exercise, the volunteer defiantly told the pretend election officials to get rid of voting machines. “We demand paper ballots. Your machines are garbage,” she shouted. Clements, assuming the role of the elections board chairman, announced that her allotted time for public comment was up. “Sheriff’s deputy, please come up and remove her,” he instructed. The man assigned to the role of sheriff’s deputy grabbed the volunteer by the arm, simulating her removal from the meeting.

“Let’s try something different,” Clements said, breaking the fourth wall. “I want everyone here, except the sheriff’s deputy, to stand.” As dozens of people in the crowd rose to their feet, he encouraged them to surround the volunteer, forming a wall of people between her and the sheriff’s deputy. “Come around, come around, fill up this whole way,” he said. 

Clements looked approvingly at the mass of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder before him. “Now, I hope that you guys are getting the lightbulb on right now that the power dynamic in this room changed instantly,” he said. “Look at where [the volunteer] is and look at that poor deputy, with a giant wall of people between them. You think he’s going to be in any rush?”

Attendees shouted in response: “No, no!”

Caption: David Clements conducts a “Gideon 300” training in Hogansville, Georgia, on Sept. 21, 2024.

Clements made a point of telling his audience that the “Gideon 300” strategy they had just role-played is consistent with lawful, peaceful protest under the First Amendment. But he did not mention a critical fact: that efforts to physically block a police officer from removing a speaker at a public meeting may well amount to the crime of obstructing or hindering a law enforcement officer under Georgia law, potentially resulting in arrest or prosecution.

Asked later in his interview with Lawfare about whether his trainings encourage people to physically impede the police during local elections meetings, Clements said, “there’s no blocking of law enforcement.” Instead, he described the simulation exercise as an effort to demonstrate to trainees how they can surround a public speaker en masse to disincentivize the police from attempting to make a removal or arrest in the first place. “There’s a positioning where they actually stand, where they stand before someone approaches,” he said. “And there’s not an easy access point. What you’re going to find in most of those cases is the sheriff's deputy doesn’t even attempt to engage with the person.” 

At Grace Covenant, however, not every trainee seemed to understand this fine distinction. At one point, Tamara Favorito rose to her feet. “In Georgia, we are practicing Gideon 300,” she announced. But she said the role-playing exercise helped her understand that there was something missing from their training. Tamara pointed to a 2023 incident in Chatham County, where a woman was forcibly removed by police after she ignored orders to stop speaking during a board of elections meeting. The sheriff’s deputies “pulled her out like an animal,” according to Tamara. “Just one woman moved toward her, and one of the deputies pushed her out of the way,” she continued. Tamara said she realizes now that one person moving wasn’t enough. “I think if we had trained people to do that and move quickly, if everybody that was there had moved quickly, they would not have been able to haul her out of there,” she said.

Neither Tamara nor Garland Favorito responded to a request for comment. 

In the past, Clements has acknowledged that his advocacy strategy involves potentially unlawful tactics—or, at least, tactics that will be treated as such. “You have to be willing to be arrested,” he said during an appearance on the “All Politics Is Local” podcast earlier this year. “You have to be willing to be jailed over this. This is like an abolitionist movement.”

In his interview with Lawfare, Clements used a number of different approaches to reconcile such comments—which seem to recognize that arrest is a possibility—with his claim that his tactics are all lawful. He argued that the tactics are all just peaceful speech seeking redress of grievance. He also argued that to the extent they may violate the law, such arrests might be necessary to posture police actions for challenge. He argued sometimes that there’s a higher law at issue. And he argued that what he is urging is no different from the civil rights movement. 

“I could say the same thing looking back at the civil rights movement in the 1960s, where you had African Americans fighting for equality of the vote. ... [T]hey were locking arms, getting sprayed by water cannons to posture and bring awareness to people to treat them equally.”

During the training exercise, Clements also assured attendees that county election officials have lawful grounds to withhold certification of election results. “It’s based in law, because they actually have a trust and responsibility to make sure that your vote is true and accurate,” he said.

This is a plainly inaccurate representation of the law, as least as the courts have authoritatively interpreted it over many decades. In Georgia and elsewhere, local election officials cannot lawfully refuse to certify election results. Courts have overwhelmingly held that local election boards have a “ministerial,” or mandatory, duty to certify. If an elections board withholds certification, courts can force it to certify by issuing a writ of mandamus. And in some jurisdictions, local officials could be subject to criminal sanctions if they refuse to certify election results. In 2023 in Cochise County, Arizona, for example, two election officials were indicted for election interference after they voted to delay certification past the statutory deadline. Earlier this month, one of the officials, Peggy Judd, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge as a part of a plea deal.

Clements is aware of all this. He has griped on social media and podcast episodes about instances in which courts have forced officials to certify, and he has shared articles about the Cochise County indictments. Yet in Hogansville, he stood before a church filled with non-lawyers, telling them that their local officials could lawfully withhold certification of the election and that they can defy and impede law enforcement in an effort to pressure those officials to do so. 

In his interview with Lawfare, Clements stressed that in very few states is the ministerial nature of the boards’ duty to certify statutory in nature. In most states, it’s purely a matter of judge-made law, he argued. By contrast, he contended, the boards are violating statutes in any number of ways by certifying fraudulent election returns.

Indeed, when Clements describes an act as “lawful,” it’s not always clear which type of law he’s referring to—the laws of God, or the laws of man. As he explained to the audience in Hogansville, some of his thinking in this respect is rooted in a natural law theory called the “doctrine of lesser magistrates,” which claims that local elected officials—dubbed “lesser magistrates”—have a divine duty to oppose unjust or immoral laws imposed by higher government authorities. The doctrine is set out at length in a book by Matthew Trewhella, a pastor and anti-abortion activist who has become increasingly influential among some prominent conservatives. Michael Flynn, Trump’s one-time national security adviser, has said that Trewhella’s book on the doctrine is a “blueprint showing Americans how to successfully resist tyranny.”

The training in Hogansville was not the first time Clements has cited Trewhella’s work as a kind of theological justification for his fight against election fraud. He has invoked the natural law doctrine at other events, often when comparing his quest to get rid of voting machines to that of Civil War-era abolitionists who stood up against laws permitting slavery. On other occasions, he has compared his crusade to that of the anti-abortion movement. “We need to have the same righteous indignation that your pro-lifers used to have when they used to bar the doors of an abortion clinic because they understood that right is right and wrong is wrong,” he said at an event in Cumming, Georgia, in 2022. “And you know something? I might get arrested. But innocent life and innocent blood is being shed. They see things in a righteous way. And you need to see these machines in a righteous way,” he said. The crowd replied in unison: “Amen!”

In Hogansville, Clements had another analogy in mind—one that seems to acknowledge that under earthly law, at least, he is urging people to put themselves in jeopardy. He likened contemporary efforts to investigate election fraud to rebellion against the British crown during the American Revolution. “If it’s just about legal arguments, the corrupt, satanic attorneys win, and we lose,” he told the audience. “The founders were in the exact same position. But no one wants to say out loud that the tree of liberty has to be replenished with the blood of the tyrant and the patriot,” he said.

“Why don’t I lead with that?” Clements asked aloud. “Because I don’t want articles saying ‘David Clements is asking for the blood of, you know, whoever. Then I’ll get arrested.’” 

The crowd roared with laughter.

Clements, in all likelihood, will not get arrested. The question is how many of the people he is training and assuring of the legality of the conduct he is urging will end up getting arrested—and how many election workers they will intimidate or coax into defying the law along the way.

In his interview with Lawfare, Clements seemed genuinely unconcerned on this point and even the possibility of stoking violence. In his answer, he returned to the government’s prosecution of the Jan. 6 defendants. “The amount of restraint that I’ve seen from these J6 families in light of [their persecution], they're not the ones that are calling for violence. And in fact, if you look at J6 itself, you’ve got so many agitators that I firmly believe were unindicted fed co-conspirators,” he said. “So I’m much more heartbroken over what the government has done to American citizens and what they continue to do than [I am concerned about my] having the audacity to train people to show up to a public meeting and point out a defective process and a defective system.”

In Georgia, at least, a recent judicial decision could help mitigate efforts to persuade county officials to withhold certification of the presidential election. Three weeks after Clement’s visit to Hogansville, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney issued a declaratory judgment affirming that certification of election results is mandatory under Georgia law. 

But Clements, sharing news about the decision on social media, remained undeterred: “There is always a choice to do the right thing,” he wrote to more than 25,000 followers on Twitter, now X. “Clerks and canvassing boards must not certify a fraudulent election even under threat.”