jason snead
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</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">n “Academy” for state
lawmakers on voter suppression strategies run by the American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in July featured a veritable who’s
who of the right-wing leaders behind this year’s disinformation campaign
about voter fraud and assaults on voting rights across the country,
documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) show.
While
the July 26-28 session was ostensibly led by the dark money group
Honest Elections Project, it was organized, hosted, and bankrolled by
ALEC, despite repeated claims by its CEO, Lisa Nelson, that the group
does not work on voting issues.
Nelson provided the formal
welcome at the conference’s opening session, ALEC staff organized
turnout, and ALEC provided two nights of accommodations at the five-star
Grand America Hotel, five meals, and a $450 travel reimbursement for
attendees. ALEC’s annual meeting was held at the same hotel immediately
after the Academy.
An invite published by CMD in July stated that
“13 legislators from across the country” would be in attendance, but
the materials acquired by CMD do not include an attendance list.
Rather
than email materials to ALEC lawmakers that may be subject to open
records laws, ALEC distributed hard copies of the agenda at registration
along with a “zip drive containing a resources document and a one-pager
on your state’s election policies,” according to an email from Sarah
Wall, ALEC’s manager of legislative outreach and coalitions, obtained by
CMD. Wall’s email also lists Michael Bowman, president of ALEC Action,
as a key contact for the event.
Nelson tipped her hand about
ALEC’s voter suppression subterfuge in May at a meeting of the far-right
Council for National Policy. Video of the event obtained by CMD shows
Nelson speaking frankly about ALEC’s work on voting and revealing its
plans to outsource model policy on the controversial topic to avert the
spotlight. “We don’t have model policy. We will be developing that at
the Honest Elections Project [Academy], through them,” Nelson said.
<b>Honest Elections Project, </b>the
group ALEC chose to carry the ball on its voting agenda, is a dark
money operation formed in February 2020 to push for voting restrictions
and spread baseless and dangerous claims about election fraud, laying
the groundwork for Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. It is a
project of The 85 Fund, the new legal name for the Judicial Education
Project, a group linked to Leonard Leo that played a central role in
Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges.
Speakers
at the Academy featured many of the key strategists and leaders on the
Right spreading misinformation around voter fraud, promoting Trump’s
lies around the 2020 election, and pushing sweeping new voting
restrictions.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita gave the
keynote address. A proponent of Trump’s Big Lie that the election was
stolen, Rokita recently testified in front of the U.S. Senate against
strengthening the federal Voting Rights Act.
Rokita was one of
only four state attorneys general to not sign a National Association of
Attorneys General letter condemning the Jan. 6 violent insurrection at
the U.S. Capitol, and is a member of the Republican Attorneys General
Association (RAGA). RAGA was a member of the “March to Save America”
coalition that organized the Jan. 6 rally, and its policy arm, Rule of
Law Defense Fund, sent out robocalls urging supporters to “march to the
Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.”
Agenda Focused on Election Legislation
Most
of the Academy sessions focused on legislation, giving legislators a
chance to discuss bills to restrict voting that have already been
introduced and passed in their states this year and hear from
Republican-aligned leaders about what more they think needs to be done.
By
the time ALEC held its voter suppression Academy in July, 18 states had
already passed 30 laws this year making it harder to vote, according to
the Brennan Center for Justice.
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Honest Elections Project’s Executive Director<b> Jason Snead</b>,
who worked with ALEC to organize the event, laid out “priorities for
election integrity across the states” and polling results in a breakfast
session and appeared on another panel on how to “shore up” legislative
control over election processes with Jason Torchinsky and Lee Goodman.</span>
<b>The
Honest Elections Project has aggressively promoted a radical legal
theory called the “independent state legislatures doctrine,” </b>which holds
that state courts don’t have the authority to review state election
laws and would empower heavily gerrymandered state legislatures to
determine election outcomes.
Republican legislators have already
introduced and passed bills in 2021 “interfering with nonpartisan local
election administration and consolidating power to administer and
determine elections results themselves,” the Voting Rights Lab reported.
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Snead
is a former senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation where he
developed its Election Fraud Database, which the Brennan Center for
Justice says “grossly exaggerated” the extent of voter fraud. </span>
<b>
</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);"><b>Torchinsky </b>is
general counsel for the National Republican Redistricting Trust and has
been defending ALEC against CMD’s state complaints alleging that ALEC
illegally gave sophisticated voter management campaign software linked
to the Republican National Committee to its legislative members</span>.
Goodman
is an elections attorney and a former Republican chairman and
commissioner of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2013 and
2018.
Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage
Action, and Ken Blackwell, executive director of the MAGA voter
suppression center at America First Policy Institute led another
legislative session on “securing absentee ballots.”
Anderson
bragged to Heritage donors in April that policies, “severely restricting
mail ballot drop boxes” and “preventing election officials from sending
absentee ballot request forms to voters” were among recommendations
Heritage gave Georgia for its massive voter suppression bill.
Blackwell’s
Center for Election Integrity recently published a “Top 25 Common-Sense
State Election Integrity Reforms” fact sheet that includes these
Heritage recommendations alongside other extreme voter suppression
wish-list items, such as eliminating no-excuse absentee ballots and
requiring an affidavit for absentee applications.
Blackwell also
moderated a panel at the Academy with state legislators “discussing
election challenges they’ve faced in their own states.”
Another
panel over breakfast covered “things to consider with implementation of
laws” related to election day voter registration, “election observer
protections,” and organizing seniors to work the polls. Chairman of the
U.S. Election Assistance Commission Donald Palmer, a Trump appointee,
and Cleta Mitchell, chair of the Conservative Partnership Institute’s
Election Integrity Network, led the session.
Mitchell is a Big
Lie fueler and Trump legal advisor who lost her job at Foley &
Lardner following news that she participated in a January call in which
Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to make
him the winner of the state’s electoral votes.
“On Dec. 30, Cleta
Mitchell wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and offered
to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of
election fraud,” The Washington Post Magazine reported. Meadows is now a
colleague of Mitchell’s at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
Three
Republican secretaries of state, Tennessee’s Tre Hargett, Kentucky’s
Michael Adams, and West Virginia’s Mac Warner, spoke on a panel about
“what policies the states need to employ to make it easier to vote and
harder to cheat.”
“Easier to vote and harder to cheat” has been a favored talking point of Republicans in recent years.
All
three are active in the Republican Secretaries of State Committee
(RSSC), with Hargett serving as chair and Adams as vice chair.
Republican secretaries of state produced a report on “Best Practices for
Making It Easier to Vote and Harder to Cheat” for the Republican State
Leadership Committee, obtained by CMD.
The RSSC holds monthly
calls that Commissioner Palmer often attends. Secretary Warner and
Palmer also participated in an “off-the-record” Election University
session on June 21 as part of the U.S. House GOP’s “Faith in Elections
Project,” as first reported by CMD.</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ALEC Lawmakers Consider Litigation
ALEC’s
Academy featured two panels on litigation. The first dealt with
“anticipating challenges to the Voting Rights Act in Arizona,” legal
challenges mounted by Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias, and
redistricting fights, and was led by with Republican lawyers<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Torchinsky</span>, Michael Thielen, and Brian Barnes.
Thielen
is the executive director of the Republican National Lawyers
Association and served on the national board of Lawyers for Trump in
- Barnes was involved in legal challenges to changes in voting
procedures in North Carolina and Pennsylvania last fall.
Goodman
and Utah’s former Solicitor General Tyler Green led the second panel on
“operationalizing litigation challenges.” Noted in the description of
the panel are “ways to challenge the scope of litigation attacks on new
election integrity legislation (defense) as well as advance the ball on
election integrity (offense).”
As of Oct. 3, “at least 43 voting
cases have been filed in 12 states, and Georgia and Texas lead the way
with ten new lawsuits each in 2021,” the Brennan Center reports.
Training Sessions on “the Left”
Two
trainings focused on “the Left” filled out the remaining agenda at the
ALEC Academy. Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow and manager of the
Heritage Foundation’s “Election Reform Initiative,” and Ken Cuccinelli,
former Trump staffer and chairman of the Election Transparency
Initiative, led a session focused on “the Left’s attack on our election
system” through “state-level attacks on election integrity legislation”
and HR 1, the sweeping voting rights and campaign reform bill pending in
Congress.
Spakovsky, who was appointed by Trump to his
ill-fated Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, has
been a major mouthpiece of the voter fraud myth from the Right for well
over a decade.
President of the Capital Research Center Scott
Walter gave the keynote for a “Mapping the Left Lunch.” Walter and CRC
received funding from the Bradley Foundation to develop an “Online
Encyclopedia of the Left,” inspired by CMD’s SourceWatch, called
“Influence Watch.” The site was “constructed in partnership with Berman
and Company,” run by PR spin doctor Richard Berman, and in collaboration
with ALEC.
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