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Election denial activists promote dubious database to catch supposed voter fraud
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 11/02/26
A group of election denial activists — Peter Ticktin, Jerome Corsi, Wayne Allyn Root, and John W. “Rick” Richards Jr. — have been using right-wing podcast appearances ahead of the upcoming midterms to promote ELLY, a tool Richards created that they claim helps expose voter fraud. They have also claimed to have passed on supposed data from ELLY to the Trump administration, even as experts have criticized the tool for potential “high false positive rates,” privacy concerns, “and unvalidated accuracy claims that threaten eligible voters’ rights.”
What is ELLY?
ELLY, a tool that supposedly analyzes voter rolls, was developed by election denial activists and is reportedly “being marketed to county officials” in Georgia, Missouri, and North Carolina ahead of the midterm elections. According to NBC News, ELLY is used to “aggregate public records like obituaries, U.S. Postal Service data, property tax information or maps from Google to help users cross-reference the data with voter registrations.”
ELLY is being pitched to officials as “an alternative to ERIC,” or the Electronic Registration Information Center, “the nonpartisan data-sharing network that’s considered the gold standard in helping states maintain accurate voter records.” ERIC became a target of misinformation from right-wing media in recent years, and multiple Republican-led states have since left the group.
NBC News noted that “America’s voter rolls are largely built for registration, not removal, and election officials do struggle to keep them up to date.” But the report explained that ELLY “will rely entirely on public records,” using data that “is less reliable than the personal, protected information government entities have and use … to maintain voter rolls, like Social Security and driver’s license numbers.”
David Becker, who helped build the Electronic Registration Information Center and now runs the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, has “said ERIC didn’t use public data because it was clear the rate of false positives would be too high.” He told NBC that “even names and birthday[s] or birth date[s] result in huge numbers of false positives, far more false positives than true positives. And so in order to get quality data, you need to have the sensitive information.”
Who is behind ELLY?
ELLY comes from John W. “Rick” Richards Jr., a retired physician from Georgia, and his son, John W. Richards III. The two created a similar tool called “EagleAI NETwork” that they promoted in 2023 and which was reportedly used in Georgia “to file mass voter challenges in 2024.” Election experts told NBC News at the time that “the kind of public data that Richards plans to use may lead to a high rate of false positives,” adding that EagleAI “draws inaccurate conclusions and then presents them as if they are evidence of wrongdoing” and “might employ search techniques that could be discriminatory.”
“The results are going to vastly over-inflate potentially inaccurate voter registrations,” said Becker.
EagleAI was also promoted by fellow election denial activist Cleta Mitchell, who founded the Election Integrity Network and helped the effort to undermine ERIC. In February, Richards was photographed dining with Mitchell along with Heather Honey and Marci McCarthy, who are two election deniers Trump installed in his administration.
Kris Jurski, whom NBC News has described as “a Florida activist who has promoted election conspiracy theories and built his own voter roll review program,” claimed that he also “helped build ELLY.” NBC also reported that he “has been promoting it to activist groups and on social media.”
Who is promoting ELLY for the midterms?
Citation
From the October 20, 2026, edition of The Gateway Pundit's War Zone with Wayne Allyn Root, streamed on Rumble
During media appearances in the weeks leading up to the 2026 midterm elections, several election denial activists have promoted ELLY, making claims about what it can find and encouraging audiences to use the tool.
Jerome Corsi, who has a history of spreading conspiracy theories, touted ELLY on the podcasts of David “Nino” Rodriguez and Wayne Allyn Root, saying that he wanted to “mak[e] sure you’re aware of it and others are aware of” the tool. Corsi has claimed that ELLY is “50 different databases coordinated” with all kinds of information regarding voters that will “monitor mail ballots coming and be able to determine which ones are valid and which ones are not valid” and thus “prove that crimes were committed.”
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Citation
From the October 16, 2026, edition of DO NOT TALK, streamed on YouTube
Peter Ticktin, an attorney and longtime friend of President Donald Trump, has said that ELLY includes information connecting “voter rolls together with the property appraisers of your county.” He has claimed that with the tool, “we’re going to catch these guys doing the crimes that they’re doing, and then we’re going to be able to make it transparent,” declaring: “This is our opportunity to get our country back.”
Wayne Allyn Root, a radio host with a history of spreading election denial and conspiracy theories, has repeatedly had Corsi, Ticktin, and Richards on his podcast to discuss ELLY. Root also urged his audience to email him to get them in touch with Corsi, Ticktin, and Richards about the database.
During Richards’ repeated appearances alongside Corsi and Ticktin on Root’s podcast, he has claimed that ELLY “democratized the entire U.S. voter roll.” Richards has also said that “we can forward the exact data to the politicians and the lawyers to prove what the outcome should have been.”
Who would even use the dubious ELLY tool?
The tool is apparently being pitched to other election denial activists, state and county election officials, and even the Trump administration. On October 30, election denial activist Peter Bernegger claimed that there are “big problems with mail-in ballots for midterms in Wisconsin,” citing ELLY and an absentee mail-in ballot list from the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
During podcasts, Ticktin, Corsi, and Root have clearly expressed that they are trying to get the database to Trump, his administration, or the GOP in hopes that they will use it in the 2026 elections. These three election denial activists all appear to have ties to the Trump administration, repeatedly claiming that they have interacted with the president and his staff. And some of these interactions appear to have led to policy outcomes: Root recently took credit for Trump announcing $1 million for anyone who reports voter fraud that leads to a conviction.
Root has also said that “the facts of the ELLY system” combined with the “synergy” of the $1 million offer could help Trump declare a national emergency “after the election,” something they all have pushed for since last year. Ticktin also seemed to suggest that the supposed data gives Trump “what he needs” for such a declaration.
Video
Citation
From the October 28, 2026, edition of The Gateway Pundit's War Zone with Wayne Allyn Root, streamed on Rumble
Promoting ELLY on Root’s October 26 show, Corsi said that “average Americans can take advantage of” Trump’s offer by using “our database.” During another appearance, Corsi claimed that people could use his and Ticktin’s websites to document supposed tips about election fraud, explaining they’re going to create a “structured mechanism.” According to Corsi, they will use ELLY to check tips, go “through Peter Ticktin’s office [to] file it into the Department of Justice under this $1 million bounty,” and then “we’ll make sure they’re filed with the FBI, and we’ll make sure you get credit for the case that’s filed.“ Root said that he would put their form on his website as well.
Other claims from these election deniers include:
Ticktin claimed that he and Corsi had been “advising the president of the program that Rick Richards has developed,” which Trump was “pretty happy” about.
Corsi claimed that “these databases have been turned over to the Department of Justice and to Homeland Security,” which are “using the tool themselves to do their criminal investigations.”
Root asked Richards and Corsi to give him “bullet points” about the database “because I’d like to send it to President Trump and make sure he knows it exists out there, and I'd like to send it to some Republican candidates I know here in the state of Nevada to make sure they know it exists.”
Root also suggested that he would write a column regarding the database and would “text” and “call” Trump about it, promising to “send it to President Trump’s office — I’ve got good friends there who hand everything to President Trump.”
Corsi has expressed hope that candidates in the upcoming midterms “who lose or those who want to contest an election, perhaps even before it’s certified,” could use the database “to challenge an election result.” Corsi also said that he would “like to share this with candidates” in order to “show you in your race the ballots that ought to be challenged,” so “if candidates get in touch with us, we will get them the data” that could establish “a pretty good basis for saying this election was fraudulently conducted and should not be certified.”
Ticktin urged “every one of the candidates that loses” in the midterms to “contact me or Jerome Corsi or Rick Richards” to “help you get set up with this program,” adding, “If you qualify for turn[ing] people into the DOJ, we’ll give you the information you need to be able to do that.”
Video
Citation
From the October 27, 2026, edition of The Gateway Pundit's War Zone with Wayne Allyn Root, streamed on Rumble
The effort to tout ELLY comes as election denial activists have pushed other measures to try to undermine the midterms. Corsi and Ticktin were reportedly involved with a proposed executive order declaring a “national emergency” over elections that circulated within the Trump administration. Root also proposed his own version of a national emergency, saying he messaged and spoke with Trump about it. He subsequently pushed it to Trump during an interview
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Key election denial activists in the right-wing media ecosystem
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Zeteo reports that President Donald Trump and Republicans are “engaging in an all-out effort to challenge the results of next week’s midterm elections in a desperate campaign to cling to power” for the next two years. But sources inside the White House confirm that Trump is personally issuing the marching orders — regardless of the damage it does to American democracy. ADMIT ON AK?
“The president and the White House are steering all of this,” a Trump adviser told Zeteo.
The Trump administration is already spreading unfounded fears of noncitizen voting, in what Zeteo writers Justin Glawe and Asawin Suebsaeng describe as “selectively and vindictively targeting political opponents and liberal state leaders.” They’re also conducting arrests and threatening to criminally prosecute Democratic election officials, and they’re strong-arming the politicized Justice Department to argue in court that an election isn’t legally legitimate unless Trump’s side is the winner in it.
“To help sway the election in Republicans’ favor, the DOJ is apparently violating its own policies by attempting to interfere with how states administer elections and determine the validity of votes,” reports Zeteo. “And even as its lawsuits flounder, the Trump-Vance administration has zero intention of taking its foot off the gas between now and Election Night, and possibly beyond.”
The dark cloud looming over November consists of three scenarios that have election officials "holding their breath,” reports Zeteo. This includes the prospect of the president installing military troops or federal law enforcement in polling locations. It could also include attempts to block the certification of valid election results, either by lawsuit or by outright seizing ballots or voting machines. And Trump himself has suggested he might challenge the election victories of Democrats if Republicans are not victorious in certain elections.
“Again: Trump has refused to rule any of this out,” reports Zeteo, “and has indeed test-run preliminary versions of each authoritarian power grab.”
According to sources speaking with Zeteo, Trump is already hammering away in the background, demanding if his lieutenants and assorted hacks are “ready for different election challenges.”
Trump has already admitted his intent on the record, reports Zeteo, telling reporters that “I’m the one that said do it,” when explaining a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to proactively decertify the outcome of the race for one of Alaska’s U.S. Senate seats if a Republican is not the winner.
It does not matter that Justice Department guidelines are clear that the DOJ is not supposed to interfere with how states handle elections, according to the DOJ’s own website. But consistency is not the Trump administration’s strong suit, reports Zeteo.
DOJ spokespeople did not respond to Zeteo’s request for comment, including on details of whether or not the head of the public integrity section officially waived its own guidelines.
“Either way, the intent of the policies is clear,” Zeteo reports.
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NEW REP OCT 2024
...According to The Guardian, the emails also backed up previous reporting about two Trump-aligned state election board members who had passed two rules that now allow members to refuse to certify election results. This bogus idea that county board members should exercise a veto of voters’ will was the basis of Trump’s attempted coup. It’s hugely troubling that conservatives have identified this as a viable strategy to disenfranchise voters and undermine their preferences. PITBULLS
Ohio is another state where EIN’s agenda is resonating. The network’s Ohio state chapter played a key role in the effort to purge 20,000 voters from the rolls in Licking County, which had a huge population boom among Black and Asian residents. What’s more, the chapter collaborated with conservative lawmakers on a bill to eliminate voting machines so all ballots are counted by hand. In addition to adding a level of inefficiency, the bill would require a photo ID to register to vote, necessitating more voter roll maintenance.
In North Carolina, EIN met with state legislators who put together a bill that has been referred to as a “jumbo jet of a voter suppression bill.” In Pennsylvania, Cleta Mitchell spoke with a prominent voter suppression group on messaging tactics regarding the election. EIN also appears to have been part of the efforts of Wisconsin legislators to purge voter rolls in the state. All of these states are competitive on the state level and crucial at the national level, meaning Mitchell and EIN’s machinations to suppress voter turnout could have outsize ramifications beyond the affected populations.
One of Mitchell and EIN’s biggest wins has been provoking some states to leave the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. ERIC is the nonprofit member organization created and managed by state-level officials. Its members use a voter roll software that can accurately track and cull eligible voters. Mitchell held a summit in 2022 in which she presented a 29-page report on how ERIC was a threat to election integrity. Some of the secretaries of states from the first five states to pull out of ERIC—Louisiana, Florida, Missouri, West Virginia, and Ohio—were in attendance at that conference. ERIC also plays a role in helping states reach out to people who are not registered to vote. Mitchell pushed for states to move toward using her own organization’s software, Eagle AI.
Pronounced “Eagle Eyes,” this software is one of the most important tools at EIN’s disposal. It is a database tool that performs “maintenance” on voter rolls amassed by a web scraper. Eagle AI has been deployed to cook up the voter roll challenges by EIN and its allies. The database tries to match voter roll records with “accurate” information (such as addresses, obituaries, etc.) scraped from the internet to determine if any rolls are fraudulent.
The problem with this system is that the data is at best inconsistent. Some of the data that Eagle AI pulls is outdated, meaning that many of the voter roll challenges relying on the software as a primary source may be entirely inaccurate. The reality is that EIN’s Eagle AI is more likely to purge voters’ registration based on erroneous data than actually secure the integrity of our elections.
The Election Integrity Network’s actions should be viewed within the context of the larger network of right-wing activists to which it belongs. EIN is a member organization of the Virginia Fair Elections Coalition, a project of the Koch-funded State Policy Network’s Virginia Institute for Public Policy, or VIPP, and run by VIPP’s president, Lynn Taylon. The Virginia Fair Elections Coalition’s members utilize the Virginia Model—effectively a playbook on how to suppress election turnout.
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Former President Donald Trump and his supporters are setting their sights on a relatively unknown and mundane target, but election integrity experts say the results could have disastrous consequences in 2024.
On Friday, Rolling Stone reported that Trumpworld is coming after the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which dozens of states have used to organize voter registration data that was previously kept on paper. ERIC was created by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and has been used by both Democratic and Republican-controlled states without incident since 2012. However, the ex-president has railed against ERIC on his Truth Social page, calling it a "terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up."
Trump has called on Republican secretaries of state to pull out of ERIC, and MAGA-aligned attorney Cleta Mitchell has baselessly asserting that it was created and funded by Democratic billionaire George Soros (a rep for Soros' foundation told CNN it has "never funded" ERIC). Following the far-right's attacks on the system, ERIC has gone from being used by 33 states to just 24 as of December 2023.
According to Rolling Stone, ERIC allows states an easy way to purge voter rolls of deceased or ineligible voters, and offers a secure way for different secretaries of state to confidentially share voter info, like driver's license numbers and the last four digits of a voter's Social Security number "to eliminate any confusion about who a voter is and whether they’re eligible to register."
ERIC co-founder and former executive director David Becker — who resigned this year amid a GOP-led pressure campaign — said the far right's anti-ERIC campaign can lead to voter lists being "significantly less accurate" as more states pull out. He added that the problems that will inevitably arise from states not using ERIC could help fuel false narratives about supposedly stolen elections.
"There will be old records on the voter lists of people who are no longer eligible in the state that will fuel false claims of potential voter fraud. And there will be inaccurate records [of those] who are eligible in the state who moved within the state that they will likely not catch," Becker said. "Faulty voter files create long lines on Election Day, delays in getting mail-in ballots, an increase in provisional ballots, and delays in determining a winner."
“The more problems at the polls, the more lines, the more provisional ballots, the longer it takes to count overall ballots and get an unofficial winner, those all feed into the potential for chaos and even incitement to violence by election losers," he continued.
READ MORE:'Glitch' affects touchscreen voting machines in swing Pennsylvania county: 'Peak of mistrust'
Voting software company EagleAI, which was developed by a healthcare CEO from Alabama, is being fielded as a MAGA alternative to ERIC. However, Georgia director of elections Blake Evans criticized an EagleAI presentation as "confused," and said it could "steer counties towards unlawful list-maintenance activities." Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said the software's pattern of using property tax records to determine voter eligibility was "utterly unreliable" and could result in litigation from voters being falsely removed.
"There’s any number of spouses who do not show up on property–tax records. No one who rents an apartment will show up on property-tax records," Schmidt said.
Click here to read Rolling Stone's full report.
READ MORE:'Thousands of mail ballots not counted': PA gov fixing issue that disenfranchised 17K voters
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Inside Ziklag, the Christian-Right Group Trying to Sway the 2024 Election — ProPublica
A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.
These previously unreported plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.
ProPublica and Documented obtained thousands of Ziklag’s members-only email newsletters, internal videos, strategy documents and fundraising pitches, none of which has been previously made public. They reveal the group’s 2024 plans and its long-term goal to underpin every major sphere of influence in American society with Christianity. In the Bible, the city of Ziklag was where David and his soldiers found refuge during their war with King Saul.
“We are in a spiritual battle and locked in a terrible conflict with the powers of darkness,” says a strategy document that lays out Ziklag’s 30-year vision to “redirect the trajectory of American culture toward Christ by bringing back Biblical structure, order and truth to our Nation.”
Ziklag’s 2024 agenda reads like the work of a political organization. It plans to pour money into mobilizing voters in Arizona who are “sympathetic to Republicans” in order to secure “10,640 additional unique votes” — almost the exact margin of President Joe Biden’s win there in 2020. The group also intends to use controversial AI software to enable mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states.
In a recording of a 2023 internal strategy discussion, a Ziklag official stressed that the objective was the same in other swing states. “The goal is to win,” the official said. “If 75,000 people wins the White House, then how do we get 150,000 people so we make sure we win?”
According to the Ziklag files, the group has divided its 2024 activities into three different operations targeting voters in battleground states: Checkmate, focused on funding so-called election integrity groups; Steeplechase, concentrated on using churches and pastors to get out the vote; and Watchtower, aimed at galvanizing voters around the issues of “parental rights” and opposition to transgender rights and policies supporting health care for trans people.
In a member briefing video, one of Ziklag’s spiritual advisers outlined a plan to “deliver swing states” by using an anti-transgender message to motivate conservative voters who are exhausted with Trump.
But Ziklag is not a political organization: It is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity, the same legal designation as the United Way or Boys and Girls Club. Such organizations do not have to publicly disclose their funders, and donations are tax deductible. In exchange, they are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.
ProPublica and Documented presented the findings of their investigation to six nonpartisan lawyers and legal experts. All expressed concern that Ziklag was testing or violating the law.
The reporting by ProPublica and Documented “casts serious doubt on this organization’s status as a 501(c)(3) organization,” said Roger Colinvaux, a professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law.
“I think it’s across the line without a question,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a University of Notre Dame law professor.
Ziklag officials did not respond to a detailed list of questions. Martin Nussbaum, an attorney who said he was the group’s general counsel, said in a written response that “some of the statements in your email are correct. Others are not,” but he then did not respond to a request to specify what was erroneous. The group is seeking to “align” the culture “with Biblical values and the American constitution, and that they will serve the common good,” he wrote. Using the official tax name for Ziklag, he wrote that “USATransForm does not endorse candidates for public office.” He declined to comment on the group’s members.
There are no bright lines or magic words that the IRS might look for when it investigates a charitable organization for engaging in political intervention, said Mayer. Instead, the agency examines the facts and circumstances of a group’s activities and makes a conclusion about whether the group violated the law.
The biggest risk for charities that intervene in political campaigns, Mayer said, is loss of their tax-exempt status. Donors’ ability to deduct their donations can be a major sell, not to mention it can create “a halo effect” for the group, Mayer added.
“They may be able to get more money this way,” he said, adding, “It boils down to tax evasion at the end of the day.”
“Dominion Over the Seven Mountains”
Ziklag has largely escaped scrutiny until now. The group describes itself as a “private, confidential, invitation-only community of high-net-worth Christian families.”
According to internal documents, it boasts more than 125 members that include business executives, pastors, media leaders and other prominent conservative Christians. Potential new members, one document says, should have a “concern for culture” demonstrated by past donations to faith-based or political causes, as well as a net worth of $25 million or more. None of the donors responded to requests for comment.
Tax records show rapid growth in the group’s finances in recent years. Its annual revenue climbed from $1.3 million in 2018 to $6 million in 2019 and nearly $12 million in 2022, which is the latest filing available.
The group’s spending is not on the scale of major conservative funders such as Miriam Adelson or Barre Seid, the electronics magnate who gave $1.6 billion to a group led by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo. But its funding and strategy represent one of the clearest links yet between the Christian right and the “election integrity” movement fueled by Trump’s baseless claims about voting fraud. Even several million dollars funding mass challenges to voters in swing counties can make an impact, legal and election experts say.
Ziklag was the brainchild of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Ken Eldred. It emerged from a previous organization founded by Eldred called United In Purpose, which aimed to get more Christians active in the civic arena, according to Bill Dallas, the group’s former director. United In Purpose generated attention in June 2016 when it organized a major meeting between then-candidate Trump and hundreds of evangelical leaders.
After Trump was elected in 2016, Eldred had an idea, according to Dallas. “He says, ‘I want all the wealthy Christian people to come together,’” Dallas recalled in an interview. Eldred told Dallas that he wanted to create a donor network like the one created by Charles and David Koch but for Christians. He proposed naming it David’s Mighty Men, Dallas said. Female members balked. Dallas found the passage in Chronicles that references David’s soldiers and read that they met in the city of Ziklag, and so they chose the name Ziklag.
The group’s stature grew after Trump took office. Vice President Mike Pence appeared at a Ziklag event, as did former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Sen. Ted Cruz, then-Rep. Mark Meadows and other members of Congress. In its private newsletter, Ziklag claims that a coalition of groups it assembled played “a hugely significant role in the selection, hearings and confirmation process” of Amy Coney Barrett for a Supreme Court seat in late 2020.
Confidential donor networks regularly invest hundreds of millions of dollars into political and charitable groups, from the liberal Democracy Alliance to the Koch-affiliated Stand Together organization on the right. But unlike Ziklag, neither of those organizations is legally set up as a true charity.
Ziklag appears to be the first coordinated effort to get wealthy donors to fund an overtly Christian nationalist agenda, according to historians, legal experts and other people familiar with the group. “It shows that this idea isn’t being dismissed as fringe in the way that it might have been in the past,” said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and University of California, Davis law professor.
The Christian nationalism movement has a variety of aims and tenets, according to the Public Religion Research Institute: that the U.S. government “should declare America a Christian nation”; that American laws “should be based on Christian values”; that the U.S. will cease to exist as a nation if it “moves away from our Christian foundations”; that being Christian is essential to being American; and that God has “called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”
One theology promoted by Christian nationalist leaders is the Seven Mountain Mandate. Each mountain represents a major industry or a sphere of public life: arts and media, business, church, education, family, government, and science and technology. Ziklag’s goal, the documents say, is to “take dominion over the Seven Mountains,” funding Christian projects or installing devout Christians in leadership positions to reshape each mountain in a godly way.
To address their concerns about education, Ziklag’s leaders and allies have focused on the public-school system. In a 2021 Ziklag meeting, Ziklag’s education mountain chair, Peter Bohlinger, said that Ziklag’s goal “is to take down the education system as we know it today.” The producers of the film “Sound of Freedom,” featuring Jim Caviezel as an anti-sex-trafficking activist, screened an early cut of the film at a Ziklag conference and asked for funds, according to Dallas.
An excerpt from Ziklag’s “Declaration and 30-Year Vision for the Mountains of Influence.” The document outlines Ziklag’s mission to reshape each major aspect of American society so that it operates according to a biblical worldview. Credit:Obtained by ProPublica and Documented
The Seven Mountains theology signals a break from Christian fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson. In the 1980s and ’90s, Falwell’s Moral Majority focused on working within the democratic process to mobilize evangelical voters and elect politicians with a Christian worldview.
The Seven Mountains theology embraces a different, less democratic approach to gaining power. “If the Moral Majority is about galvanizing the voters, the Seven Mountains is a revolutionary model: You need to conquer these mountains and let change flow down from the top,” said Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies and an expert on Christian nationalism. “It’s an outlined program for Christian supremacy.”
“The Amorphous, Tumultuous Wild West”
The Christian right has had compelling spokespeople and fierce commitment to its causes, whether they were ending abortion rights, allowing prayer in schools or displaying the Ten Commandments outside of public buildings. What the movement has often lacked, its leaders argue, is sufficient funding.
“If you look at the right, especially the Christian right, there were always complaints about money,” said legal historian Ziegler. “There’s a perceived gap of ‘We aren’t getting the support from big-name, big-dollar donors that we deserve and want and need.’”
That’s where Ziklag comes in.
Speaking late last year to an invitation-only gathering of Ziklaggers, as members are known, Charlie Kirk, who leads the pro-Trump Turning Point USA organization, named left-leaning philanthropists who were, in his view, funding the destruction of the nation: MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; billionaire investor and liberal philanthropist George Soros; and the two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“Why are secular people giving more generously than Christians?” Kirk asked, according to a recording of his remarks. “It would be a tragedy,” he added, “if people who hate life, hate our country, hate beauty and hate God wanted it more than us.”
“Ziklag is the place,” Kirk told the donors. “Ziklag is the counter.”
Similarly, Pence, in a 2021 appearance at a private Ziklag event, praised the group for its role in “changing lives, and it’s advanced the cause, it’s advanced the kingdom.”
A driving force behind Ziklag’s efforts is Lance Wallnau, a prominent Christian evangelist and influencer based in Texas who is described by Ziklag as a “Seven Mountains visionary & advisor.” The fiery preacher is one of the most influential figures on the Christian right, experts say, a bridge between Christian nationalism and Trump. He was one of the earliest evangelical leaders to endorse Trump in 2015 and later published a book titled “God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J. Trump and the American Unraveling.” More than 1 million people follow him on Facebook. He doesn’t try to hide his views: “Yes, I am a Christian nationalist,” he said during one of his livestreams in 2021. (Wallnau did not respond to requests for comment.)
Donald Trump shakes hands with Lance Wallnau, a self-described Christian nationalist. Credit:Lancewallnau.com
Wallnau has remained a Trump ally. He called Trump’s time in office a “spiritual warfare presidency” and popularized the idea that Trump was a “modern-day Cyrus,” referring to the Persian king who defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem. Wallnau has visited with Trump at the White House and Trump Tower; last November, he livestreamed from a black-tie gala at Mar-a-Lago where Trump spoke.
Wallnau did not come up with the notion that Christians should try to take control of key areas of American society. But he improved on the idea by introducing the concept of the seven mountains and urged Christians to set about conquering them. The concept caught on, said Taylor, because it empowered Christians with a sense of purpose in every sphere of life.
As a preacher in the independent charismatic tradition, a fast-growing offshoot of Pentecostalism that is unaffiliated with any major denomination, Wallnau and his acolytes believe that God speaks to and through modern-day apostles and prophets — a version of Christianity that Taylor, in his forthcoming book “The Violent Take It By Force,” describes as “the amorphous, tumultuous Wild West of the modern church.” Wallnau and his ideas lingered at the fringes of American Christianity for years, until the boost from the Trump presidency.
The Ziklag files detail not only what Christians should do to conquer all seven mountains, but also what their goals will be once they’ve taken the summit. For the government mountain, one key document says that “the biblical role of government is to promote good and punish evil” and that “the word of God and prayer play a significant role in policy decisions.”
For the arts and entertainment mountain, goals include that 80% of the movies produced be rated G or PG “with a moral story,” and that many people who work in the industry “operate under a biblical/moral worldview.” The education section says that homeschooling should be a “fundamental right” and the government “must not favor one form of education over another.”
Other internal Ziklag documents voice strong opposition to same-sex marriage and transgender rights. One reads: “transgender acceptance = Final sign before imminent collapse.”
Heading into the 2024 election year, Ziklag executive director Drew Hiss warned members in an internal video that “looming above and beyond those seven mountains is this evil force that’s been manifesting itself.” He described it as “a controlling, evil, diabolical presence, really, with tyranny in mind.” That presence was concentrated in the government mountain, he said. If Ziklaggers wanted to save their country from “the powers of darkness,” they needed to focus their energies on that government mountain or else none of their work in any other area would succeed.
“Operation Checkmate”
In the fall of 2023, Wallnau sat in a gray armchair in his TV studio. A large TV screen behind him flashed a single word: “ZIKLAG.”
“You almost hate to put it out this clearly,” he said as he detailed Ziklag’s electoral strategy, “because if somebody else gets ahold of this, they’ll freak out.”
He was joined on set by Hiss, who had just become the group’s new day-to-day leader. The two men were there to record a special message to Ziklag members that laid out the group’s ambitious plans for the upcoming election year.
The forces arrayed against Christians were many, according to the confidential video. They were locked in a “spiritual battle,” Hiss said, against Democrats who were a “radical left Marxist force.” Biden, Wallnau said, was a senile old man and “an empty suit with an agenda that’s written and managed by somebody else.”
Wallnau speaks with Drew Hiss, Ziklag’s executive director, about the group’s goals for political engagement. Credit:Obtained by ProPublica and Documented
In the files, Ziklag says it plans to give out nearly $12 million to a constellation of groups working on the ground to shift the 2024 electorate in favor of Trump and other Republicans.
A prominent conservative getting money from Ziklag is Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer and Trump ally who joined the January 2021 phone call when then-President Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to flip Georgia in Trump’s favor.
Mitchell now leads a network of “election integrity” coalitions in swing states that have spent the last three years advocating for changes to voting rules and how elections are run. According to one internal newsletter, Ziklag was an early funder of Mitchell’s post-2020 “election integrity” activism, which voting-rights experts have criticized for stoking unfounded fears about voter fraud and seeking to unfairly remove people from voting rolls. In 2022, Ziklag donated $600,000 to the Conservative Partnership Institute, which in turn funds Mitchell’s election-integrity work. Internal Ziklag documents show that it provided funding to enable Mitchell to set up election integrity infrastructure in Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Now Mitchell is promoting a tool called EagleAI, which has claimed to use artificial intelligence to automate and speed up the process of challenging ineligible voters. EagleAI is already being used to mount mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states, and, with Ziklag’s help, the group plans to ramp up those efforts.
SEE UI[ GINNI?
According to an internal video, Ziklag plans to invest $800,000 in “EagleAI’s clean the rolls project,” which would be one of the largest known donations to the group.
Conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, seen speaking at an event with then-President Donald Trump, received funding from Ziklag for her efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Credit:Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Ziklag lists two key objectives for Operation Checkmate: “Secure 10,640 additional unique votes in Arizona (mirroring the 2020 margin of 10,447 votes), and remove up to one million ineligible registrations and around 280,000 ineligible voters in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin.”
In a recording of an internal Zoom call, Ziklag’s Mark Bourgeois stressed the electoral value of targeting Arizona. “I care about Maricopa County,” Bourgeois said at one point, referring to Arizona’s largest county, which Biden won four years ago. “That’s how we win.”
For Operation Watchtower, Wallnau explained in a members-only video that transgender policy was a “wedge issue” that could be decisive in turning out voters tired of hearing about Trump.
The left had won the battle over the “homosexual issue,” Wallnau said. “But on transgenderism, there’s a problem and they know it.” He continued: “They’re gonna wanna talk about Trump, Trump, Trump. … Meanwhile, if we talk about ‘It’s not about Trump. It’s about parents and their children, and the state is a threat,’” that could be the “target on the forehead of Goliath.”
The Ziklag files describe tactics the group plans to use around parental rights — policies that make it easier for parents to control what’s taught in public schools — to turn out conservative voters. In a fundraising video, the group says it plans to underwrite a “messaging and data lab” focused on parental rights that will supply “winning messaging to all our partner groups to create unified focus among all on the right.” The goal, the video says, is to make parental rights “the difference-maker in the 2024 election.”
According to Wallnau, Ziklag also plans to fund ballot initiatives in seven key states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Montana, Nevada and Ohio — that take aim at the transgender community by seeking to ban “genital mutilation.” The seven states targeted are either presidential battlegrounds or have competitive U.S. Senate races. None of the initiatives is on a state ballot yet.
“People that are lethargic about the election or, worse yet, they’re gonna be all Trump-traumatized with the news cycle — this issue will get people to come out and vote,” Wallnau said. “That ballot initiative can deliver swing states.”
The last prong of Ziklag’s 2024 strategy is Operation Steeplechase, which urges conservative pastors to mobilize their congregants to vote in this year’s election. This project will work in coordination with several prominent conservative groups that support former president Trump’s reelection, such as Turning Point USA’s faith-based group, the Faith and Freedom Coalition run by conservative operative Ralph Reed and the America First Policy Institute, one of several groups closely allied with Trump.
Ziklag’s website outlines its three major operations and which mountains each one targets. Credit:Screenshot by ProPublica.
Ziklag says in a 2023 internal video that it and its allies will “coordinate extensive pastor and church outreach through pastor summits, church-focused messaging and events and the creation of pastor resources.” As preacher and activist John Amanchukwu said at a Ziklag event, “We need a church that’s willing to do anything and everything to get to the point where we reclaim that which was stolen from us.”
Six tax experts reviewed the election-related strategy discussions and tactics reported in this story. All of them said the activities tested or ran afoul of the law governing 501(c)(3) charities. The IRS and the Texas attorney general, which would oversee the Southlake, Texas, charity, did not respond to questions.
While not all of its political efforts appeared to be clear-cut violations, the experts said, others may be: The stated plan to mobilize voters “sympathetic to Republicans,” Ziklag officials openly discussing the goal to win the election, and Wallnau’s call to fund ballot initiatives that would “deliver swing states” while at the same time voicing explicit criticism of Biden all raised red flags, the experts said.
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“I am troubled about a tax-exempt charitable organization that’s set up and its main operation seems to be to get people to win office,” said Phil Hackney, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on tax-exempt organizations.
“They’re planning an election effort,” said Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer at Loeb and Loeb and a former director of the IRS’ exempt organizations division. “That’s not a 501(c)(3) activity.”
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