The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is holding its 51st Annual Meeting in Denver this week at the four-star Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center. ALEC state lawmakers, right-wing operatives, and corporate lobbyists are descending on the Rocky Mountain state to hear presentations and vote on model policies and resolutions that impact the environment, education, elections, fundamental human rights, and more.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D), Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds (R), Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (R), Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright, and GOP pollster Scott Rasmussen are slated to speak at the conference. Polis is the first high-profile Democrat to speak to the ALEC faithful in recent years.

The annual meeting officially kicked off last night with an anti-abortion “late night dessert & coffee reception” with national abortion ban proponent Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and “pre-recorded remarks” from pollster Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former senior counselor, to coach legislators on “how to communicate” about abortion during this fall’s campaign season. ALEC plotted its post-Dobbs strategy at its annual meeting last summer, and at least 684 state lawmakers affiliated with the group have voted to prohibit abortion access, a Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis found.

This morning, the “Christian ALEC” (officially the National Association of Christian Lawmakers) — which circulates anti-abortion model legislation among its members — hosted a prayer breakfast for attendees.

In June 2021, ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson wrote in Real Clear Politics, “ALEC doesn’t have ‘template legislation’ on voting because ALEC doesn’t work on voting issues.” CMD exposed that claim as a lie, revealing a Council for National Policy meeting video where she described the work ALEC was doing on the issue in targeted states and admitted to outsourcing model voting legislation to the Honest Elections Project (HEP).

ALEC has held at least three voter suppression summits with HEP, a voter suppression project of Leonard Leo’s 85 Fund, and last summer passed a model bill pushed by HEP banning ranked choice voting, the process by which voters rank candidates in order of preference on their ballots rather than simply voting in favor of a single candidate.

This week, ALEC members will consider model policies that align with HEP priorities laid out in its 2024 “Safeguarding Our Elections” report: the Citizen Only Voting Amendment and Only Citizens Vote Model Policy. While the voting amendment is targeted at prohibiting municipalities from allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, the model policy covers state and federal elections — even though it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in either. That push is part of what the New York Times describes as a wider GOP campaign designed to promote Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and “echoes the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.”

“In recent months, the specter of immigrants voting illegally in the U.S. has erupted into a leading election-year talking point for Republicans,” Politico reported. Republican-controlled legislatures in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin have placed constitutional amendments to ban noncitizen voting on the ballot this November as a way of driving GOP turnout.

ALEC is also offering a workshop on the nonissue of noncitizens voting, called “States Must Do: Protecting the Vote.” The description of the training claims “the threat of non-citizen participation in our US elections is real.”

ALEC may claim this, but the facts prove otherwise. “Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare,” the Brennan Center reported. As the Brennan Center points out, even the Charles Koch-founded and funded Cato Institute determined that “noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.”

Meeting attendees will also debate on whether to approve The School Board Election Date Act, which would politicize school board elections across the country by requiring candidates to indicate a “political party designation” beginning in 2026 and mandating that they coincide with November elections every four years. In its Safeguarding Our Elections report, HEP recommends consolidating school board election dates with general elections in November.

Another workshop, called “Foreign Influence in American Campaigns,” will consider “options” state lawmakers have to “prevent foreign influence on........

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