American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) ran an “Academy” for state lawmakers on voter suppression last July, and according to The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), it was a doozy of a party, with many right-wing players in attendance. 

The July 26-28 session was supposedly held by the Honest Elections Project, a conservative and dark money group, but ALEC funded the event, according to CMD. 

After the scheduled “Ice Cream Social,” ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson kicked off the session with opening remarks to its 16 featured lawmakers, followed by a roundtable discussion titled “What has your state done to improve election integrity in your state since the 2020 election?”

Honest Elections Project was launched in February 2020, designed to restrict voting and further Trump’s allegations of election fraud, even hoping to overturn the election itself. 

Ballotpedia reports that ALEC was founded in 1973 by former Rep. Henry Hyde, conservative activist Paul Weyrich, and Lou Barnett, who worked for former President Ronald Reagan’s 1968 presidential campaign. Through the 1980s, ALEC developed task forces to work on policy proposals that states could use to make legislation. These task forces eventually became more like think tanks as ALEC sought more input from its private-sector members.

ALEC’s operations are funded by corporations and special interest groups such as Altria, Koch Industries, UPS, FedEx, Pfizer, Duke Energy, Charter Communications, Comcast, and Anheuser-Busch.

CMD reports that the group was born out of The 85 Fund, the new legal name for the Judicial Education Project, a group with longtime ties to Trump judicial advisor Leonard Leo, who played a critical role in the former president’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita delivered the keynote address. The same MAGA-loving AG who Tuesday filed a third lawsuit in opposition to President Joe Biden’s federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate and was banned on Twitter after implying the 2020 election was stolen from his beloved Trump and urged federal lawmakers in October not to approve legislation strengthening a federal voting rights law.

He was also 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. He is also a member of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA).

According to Axios, state attorneys general played an “outsized role in advancing conspiracy theories about 2020 voter fraud, and RAGA’s nonprofit arm did a robocall urging ‘patriots’ to come to Washington and protest the 2020 election results.”

Breakfast was led by Jason Snead, executive director of Honest Elections Project, who laid out the priorities for “election integrity across the states, as well as polling results.” 

Snead wrote in an op-ed for Fox News in September “that voter ID laws do not depress turnout” and “Democrats aren’t just placing a heavy thumb on the scales of justices, they are turning the Voting Rights Act into a heckler’s veto that can be used to overturn even the most commonplace and popular election safeguards.”

In the Secretaries of State section of the conference, speakers Tennessee’s Tre Hargett, Kentucky’s Michael Adams, and West Virginia’s Mac Warner held a question-and-answer session on “what policies the states need to employ to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.” 

There were even two Academy pieces of training focused on “the Left.”

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. 

Sorry, we missed this important GOP planning session to keep unrepresented folk from voting.  

Outside of the ice cream, it sounds like it was a horrifying assembly of racist, anti-vaxxer, anti-mask, MAGA bootlickers, desperate to find ways to stay in power.