440 Voter Restriction Bills Introduced in 49 States - ALEC's Largest Suppression Wave

Throughout 2021, at least 440 bills containing voter restriction provisions were introduced across 49 states, representing the largest coordinated assault on voting rights since Jim Crow and demonstrating ALEC’s systematic model legislation deployment at unprecedented scale. The Brennan Center for Justice documented that state legislatures enacted far more restrictive voting laws in 2021 than in any year since tracking began in 2011—with more than one-third of all restrictive measures passed in the decade occurring in this single year.

By year’s end, 19 states had passed 34 laws restricting voting access, with Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and Texas enacting comprehensive omnibus bills containing multiple ALEC-derived provisions. The restrictions targeted mail-in voting (57 carryover bills), voter purges (expanded in at least 7 bills), voter ID requirements (23 bills), and citizenship verification (3 bills). Heritage Action coordinated with ALEC and State Policy Network to spend tens of millions of dollars writing model legislation and hiring state-level lobbyists to push the bills through legislatures.

More than 100 Republican politicians connected to ALEC in just six battleground states served as lead sponsors or cosponsors of voter suppression bills. Despite ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson’s public claim that “ALEC doesn’t have ’template legislation’ on voting,” documentary evidence and bill language analysis revealed systematic coordination. The bills used nearly identical language derived from ALEC’s model legislation, targeting the same populations—minorities, low-income voters, students, and elderly citizens—while justified through Trump’s “Big Lie” fraud allegations despite no evidence of significant election fraud.

A concerning new development emerged with “election sabotage” bills designed to allow partisan actors to reject or meddle with election results directly, moving beyond vote suppression into potential election subversion. The 2021 wave created “a stark and growing divide in the nation, where access to the right to vote increasingly depends on the state in which a voter happens to reside.” This systematic campaign represented the culmination of ALEC’s multi-decade voter suppression infrastructure: model legislation created in 2009, coordinated rollout in 2011, immediate implementation post-Shelby County in 2013, and finally weaponization of Trump’s Big Lie in 2021 to enable the largest single-year disenfranchisement campaign in modern American history.