The ‘David Clements’ campaign in Otero failed to swing the polls there, but raised his profile as an evangelical for refusing to poll. Like the traveling preacher of centuries before, he went on a speaking tour of small-town America. As of May this year, he has visited 33 states, he told a packed meeting in North Carolina.
Reuters attended a Clement lecture held at a basketball court in rural Ohio in mid-September. Clements was billed as the “Michael Jordan of the election integrity movement”. Strolling leisurely under a large American flag, he spoke to an audience of about 100 people, most of them middle-aged or elderly.
He introduced his speech with biblical allegories. He told the voters in his audience that they were like the fugitive Israelites of the Book of Exodus – “we are slaves, the people” – and the voting machines were “enslavement tools”. The local officials certifying the election results were the equivalent of the pharaoh, the Egyptian tyrant, whose pursuing army surrounded the Red Sea.
“And you’re going to have to educate them,” Clements said. “You’re going to ask him to stop the certification. You’re going to ask him to consider suing the Secretary of State.
While some in the audience took notes, Clements explained what he said were different types of voter fraud. There was a type “where you get an election worker on the inside who helps facilitate fraud – like Ruby Freeman in Georgia,” he said.
Freeman was a Georgia election worker who was falsely accused by Trump’s lawyers of pulling fake ballots from suitcases in Atlanta to rig the 2020 election for Biden. As Reuters detailed last year, state and federal officials quickly investigated the claims and found they were part of a bogus conspiracy theory hatched by Trump’s campaign to overturn the election in Georgia.
An attorney for Freeman, Von DuBose, called it “sad but not surprising” that Clements and others continue to malign Freeman over dismissed claims of voter fraud, which they said put him and other election workers at risk. .