Cleta Mitchell offered ALEC state lawmakers a list of restrictive voting policies
In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2024 election victory, the right’s “election fraud” claims magically disappeared—but only temporarily. The fraud narrative is already reemerging to justify a wave of restrictive new voting laws in 2025, according to audio obtained by Documented from a December meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or “ALEC.”
ALEC is an influential organization that brings together state legislators, private-sector corporations, and right-wing advocacy organizations. Former Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell led a December 4, 2024 panel at the ALEC meeting, where she pitched state lawmakers on a menu of restrictive new voting laws.
“We're going to begin a real effort next year to educate state legislatures and legislators, as well as members of Congress, to identify the problems” in elections, Mitchell said, according to a recording of the session. “We're going to be talking to legislators and staff about the things that need to be done to restore voter confidence.”
Mitchell offered state lawmakers a lengthy policy wish list, with calls for limiting early and mail-in voting, creating stringent new proof of citizenship and identification requirements, and making it easier to purge voters from the rolls.
It also calls for eliminating “ballot curing,” which allows eligible voters to fix technical mistakes on their ballot. The document was titled the “Voters’ Election Integrity Bill of Rights,” and which has since been updated online as the “U.S. Citizens Elections Bill of Rights.” The metadata for the online version shows it was created by an employee of the Conservative Partnership Institute, which employs Mitchell.
Mitchell, a veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, founded the Election Integrity Network in 2021 to create what she calls “permanent election integrity infrastructure” at the state level.
With backing from a small number of billionaires and wealthy special interests, the Election Integrity Network, or “EIN,” now has chapters in most states, which have mobilized far-right activists to enter the election administration system, manufacture mass voter challenges, and—increasingly— advance restrictive voting policies.
Mitchell’s ALEC panel featured two activists associated with her Election Integrity Network, Kathy Harms and Heather Honey, and a Wisconsin state lawmaker, Rep. Scott Krug.
Harms, who leads the Tennessee chapter of Mitchell’s group, emphasized that the Election Integrity Network is aiming to play a central, “behind the scenes” role in promoting strict voting legislation in 2025.
“We are very, very grateful to the Election Integrity Network, which has helped us so much in Tennessee and is working behind the scenes all across this country to get this job done,” Harms told the ALEC crowd.
The group is planning on tightening voting laws in states across the country, including in red states like Tennessee, she said. “I'm here to tell you that there isn't a state in the union that is not susceptible to issues with voters and election processes,” Harms said.
Panelists sat in front of banners from the Election Integrity Network and the Only Citizens Vote coalition, another Mitchell-backed project that pushed noncitizen voting myths in the runup to the 2024 election.
Addressing the nonexistent threat of noncitizen voting is a top priority for Mitchell’s network.
Earlier this year, with support from Mitchell, ALEC adopted “Only Citizens Vote” model legislation, which includes a call for documentary proof of citizenship. Documentary proof of citizenship is also a key element of the SAVE Act, a federal bill introduced by House Speaker Mike Johnson that Mitchell, along with other members of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, helped draft.
Demanding that voters show documents proving their citizenship status might sound superficially appealing, but it presents a problem: roughly 1 in 10 American citizens don’t have access to documents like a birth certificate or passport, and would face substantial hurdles in gaining access to the ballot box. In this way, a proof of citizenship requirement functions like an even stricter voter ID requirement.
Voter ID is still on the agenda, as well. Around thirty-six states already have laws requiring voters show identification at the polls, but Mitchell’s group is pushing to tighten ID requirements even further, demanding that “Permissible ID must confirm identity, residency, and US citizenship.” That will exclude many forms of identification that eligible voters currently use to register and vote, such as student IDs.
Mitchell’s group is also aiming to severely curtail mail-in voting, and to require “Photo ID for all methods of voting,” “including vote by mail,” according to the legislative priorities document.
Many of the legislative priorities shared at the ALEC meeting reflect longstanding EIN goals.
For example, EIN activists have long been working to block bipartisan efforts to protect election workers from harassment. In 2023, Florida Election Integrity Network activists successfully pressured lawmakers to strip a measure from an elections bill that would have made it a third-degree felony to harass or intimidate election workers.
At the ALEC conference, EIN’s managing director, Sharon Bemis, urged state lawmakers to follow suit. Bemis, a former election administrator, said state lawmakers should shut down “the threat narrative,” explaining that “the way that you can do that is by not passing bills that specifically call out election administrators for being attacked.”
“It's already a felony to assault someone,” Bemis said. “We don't need another layer that says this is an additional fine or additional sentence if it's an administrator of elections.”
At the same time, Bemis acknowledged that “election administrators are in a role where they're underpaid, overworked and under-resourced,” and that there was a need for further training—with the implication being that EIN activists should be providing that training.
Under the guise of respecting the work of election administrators—and acknowledging how their work has become more difficult in recent years—EIN’s Bemis also urged state lawmakers to protect the discretion of local election officials.
“If the election administrators have the right to make a decision, we need to make sure that there's support for that,” Bemis said, citing a 2023 decision by two Wisconsin town boards to stop using electronic voting machines, which triggered a Justice Department lawsuit to ensure that disabled voters had an accessible means of voting.
Expanding the discretion of election board members has become a flash point, however, as far-right officials have asserted that they can choose to delay or block the certification of election results based on unfounded suspicions of fraud or error. Certification has long been considered a non-discretionary duty, but right-wing activists have sought to change that.
The battle was most pitched in Georgia, where a Fulton County board member and EIN regional coordinator named Julie Adams voted against certifying the March presidential primary election. After Adams was outvoted by the board, she filed a lawsuit asking a court to find that her certification duties “are, in fact, discretionary, not ministerial.” Adams also coordinated with Mitchell ally Heather Honey to press the State Election Board to adopt a rule that would allow county board members to not certify votes they deemed suspicious.
In October, a Georgia judge rejected Adams’ petition, holding that certification is a ministerial, non-discretionary duty, and that county election board members cannot block certification of votes based on suspicions of fraud or error. “Voters would be silenced,” the judge wrote, if county election board members were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge” and refuse to certify the results.
An updated version of Mitchell’s legislative priorities document demands that lawmakers grant election officials that investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge role, and “confirm by statute [that] certification is discretionary, not ministerial.”
Some of the ALEC panel’s most aggressive critiques were directed towards pro-voter protections in federal law.
“Many, many of the problems that states face in elections are a result of bad federal law,” Mitchell said.
Heather Honey, a close Mitchell ally who has been central to several high-profile election conspiracy theories, focused her ALEC presentation on the federal law governing military and overseas voters. Honey leads the Pennsylvania EIN chapter, called Pennsylvania Fair Elections, and is an employee of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, which now houses EIN.
For years, Honey and Mitchell have been claiming that the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA, makes it too easy for U.S. citizens and members of the military living abroad to register and vote. In the final stretch of the 2024 election, Trump endorsed conspiracies about UOCAVA—and Elon Musk amplified them—and Mitchell and Honey organized a controversial lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s handling of UOCAVA ballots, filed by Honey’s Election Research Institute and eight Members of Congress. The lawsuit was quickly thrown out.
Mitchell’s legislative priorities document calls for changes to UOCAVA, such as providing separate rules for military and non-military overseas voters.
At the ALEC meeting, Honey urged state lawmakers to tighten state laws governing the acceptance of UOCAVA ballots. “We have to be really careful that we are verifying proof of U.S. citizenship, proof of prior residency in the state, and then proof of overseas address for nonmilitary,” she said. Honey also urged lawmakers to eliminate state laws allowing absentee voting from U.S. citizens born abroad, but who have never resided in the U.S.
Drawing from UOCAVA conspiracy theories, Honey’s group filed challenges to the eligibility of military voters in Pennsylvania in the final stretch of the 2024 election, in some cases using the controversial, EIN-backed Eagle AI software program.
In states across the country, mass voter challenges were a broad priority for Mitchell’s network in the 2024 election cycle—but they were often tripped up, as well-prepared local election officials rejected the thinly-sourced, software-driven submissions. Federal law’s prohibition on pre-election voter purges also frustrated their efforts.
Right-wing activists are hoping to change that in 2025.
Mitchell is demanding state lawmakers require that “election offices must accept documentation of bad registrations from citizens,” and establish a “mandatory” requirement that election officials take action on the challenges and respond, according to the legislative priorities document. Georgia’s far-right State Elections Board is similarly urging the state legislature to require local election officials to take action on mass challenges.
EIN activists are also pressing Congress to roll-back the federal National Voter Registration Act, and “repeal [voter purge] blackout periods,” which would allow right-wing activists to overwhelm election offices with mass challenges in the final weeks of the election, according to the legislative priorities document.
Mitchell and her allies outlined an aggressive agenda—one that will almost certainly prompt lawsuits from civil rights groups. But don’t let that stop you, EIN’s Harms told state lawmakers.
“We cannot be risk averse way and crying, ‘oh we might get sued,’” Harms told the group of state lawmakers. “Because that's going to move us to the status quo and stagnation.”