ALEC Develops New Model Election Bills to Implement Trump's "Big Lie"

Following Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss and false claims of widespread fraud, ALEC developed new model election legislation to give Trump’s “Big Lie” systematic legislative form across states. The organization partnered with Heritage Action and the State Policy Network to create templates for voter roll purges, ballot access restrictions, expanded poll watcher powers, and provisions allowing legislatures to override election results—measures explicitly designed to prevent future elections from achieving the historic turnout seen in 2020.

Heritage Action announced plans to spend tens of millions of dollars working with ALEC to write model voter suppression legislation and hire lobbyists to push the bills in state legislatures. The coordinated effort represented a direct response to demographic changes that had enabled Joe Biden’s victory, framing restrictions as addressing “election integrity” concerns despite no evidence of significant fraud. The racist voter fraud allegations behind the Big Lie provided political cover for systematic efforts to reduce ballot access for minority and low-income voters.

More than 100 Republican politicians connected to ALEC in just six battleground states became lead sponsors or cosponsors of voter suppression bills introduced in 2021. ALEC’s CEO Lisa Nelson publicly claimed that “ALEC doesn’t have ’template legislation’ on voting because ALEC doesn’t work on voting issues,” but documentary evidence contradicted this assertion. Analysis revealed ALEC members were leading voter suppression efforts across 2020 battleground states, using nearly identical bill language derived from coordinated model legislation.

The 2021 model bills expanded beyond ALEC’s earlier photo ID focus to include: aggressive voter roll purges targeting minority neighborhoods, restrictions on mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes, shortened early voting periods, expanded “poll watcher” authority to challenge voters, criminal penalties for election workers, and crucially, provisions allowing state legislatures to reject or overturn election results. This infrastructure transformed Trump’s false fraud claims into enforceable legal mechanisms that could be deployed to subvert future elections, representing a qualitative escalation from vote suppression to potential election subversion.