This article is It is published in partnership with the monitoring group Documented.
The pharmaceutical industry's largest lobbying group in Washington oversaw the passage of model legislation that would restrict voting access at the recent meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
The ALEC Commission is an influential organization that brings together state legislators, private sector companies, and right-wing advocacy organizations to set priorities and develop model legislation for state legislatures across the country. Its policy recommendations often become state law.
In this case, the model legislation exploits the “Make America Great Again” conspiracy around noncitizen voting and would make it easier for election officials to purge voters. The “Citizens Only Vote” model legislation directs state election officials to purge voters. Suspect These measures are intended to prevent foreigners from registering their names on the voter rolls, providing vague guidelines that would seriously limit the ability of eligible voters to vote.
The Election Integrity Network, led by Cleta Mitchell, helped draft and promote the model legislation. Mitchell—a former lawyer for Donald Trump who joined the infamous call in which the then-president demanded that Georgia’s top election official “find 11,780 votes”—also moderated a panel discussion at the ALEC meeting.
Mitchell, who has been a frequent critic of campus voting, argued at the meeting that the artificial threat of noncitizen voting justified making it more difficult for college students to vote as well.
“You don’t have to be a U.S. citizen to get a student ID card, and you don’t have to be a state resident to get a student ID card,” Mitchell said in a speech to state lawmakers. “I would urge you to introduce legislation to eliminate the student ID card as an acceptable form of identification for voter registration.” [and] “Vote.”
The Citizens Only Vote model policy, supported by the Election Integrity Network, was unanimously adopted by the Federalism and International Relations Task Force of the U.S. House of Representatives. The task force is chaired by Douglas Peterson, vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA—one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying groups, with $568 million in revenue in 2022.
The U.S. Legislative Committee’s task forces are made up of state legislators and members of the private sector, who vote separately on whether to adopt a model policy. On July 26, the public and private sector task force members voted unanimously to adopt the Citizens Only Vote bill, including Cleta Mitchell herself, who became a new member of the task force effective December 2023.
The full list of members of the U.S. Legislative Council’s Federalism and International Relations Task Force is not publicly available. An executive at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business lobbying group, served as the task force’s special chairman—a position Peterson now holds.
Last month, the U.S. Legislative Affairs Committee’s working group voted unanimously to adopt a resolution supporting state constitutional amendments to bar local governments from allowing noncitizens to vote in school board or other municipal elections. The model bills will then move to the committee’s board of directors for final approval.
It is worth noting that the pharmaceutical industry relies heavily on immigrant labor in its American workforce.
Conspiracy theories about noncitizens voting in U.S. elections have become a staple of MAGA messaging ahead of the 2024 election. It’s a manufactured threat: There’s no evidence that noncitizens are voting in large numbers. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has offered little more than “intuition” to support the claim that immigrants are voting.
However, conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting have been incorporated by influential Republican politicians, amplified by billionaires like Elon Musk, and promoted by a network of election conspiracy theorists.
The baseless conspiracy theories were on full display at the Alec Committee meeting. At a panel moderated by Mitchell, former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli claimed, without evidence, that legal loopholes “are being exploited by the left to move large numbers of noncitizens onto the voter rolls.”
Cuccinelli now works with the Election Transparency Initiative, a joint venture between the anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America and the American Principles Project. Both are funded by groups with dark money tied to far-right billionaire Dick Uihle and Leonard Leo, the highly influential architect of modern conservatism who helped orchestrate the coup against President Barack Obama. Roe v. WadeThe Election Transparency Initiative is also a partner of the Fair Elections Project, the group that Liu chairs.
One panelist, Chris Chmielinski of the Immigration Accountability Project, made the incredible assertion that “illegal immigrants […] “They’ve already violated US immigration law. Why shouldn’t we violate our voting laws, too?”
Chmielinski co-founded the Immigration Accountability Project last year after several years working at Numbers USA, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as part of a “nationalist lobby.”
The Immigration Accountability Project worked closely with Mitchell, Cuccinelli, and other right-wing organizations as part of the Citizens Only Vote coalition, which amplified conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting, organized grassroots activists, and supported federal and state legislation. The Citizens Only coalition sponsored a “president’s”-level U.S. legislative committee meeting, which cost at least $50,000.
Chmielinski has also sought to use conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting to advance old—and often cruel—political goals. He has argued that U.S. lawmakers should ban young people who came to the United States as children from being eligible for in-state tuition, tax remittances that immigrants send to family members back home, and prevent undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses.
“They are dealing with magnets that would attract some of these illegal aliens to settle in your state,” he said. “If you can prevent illegal aliens from settling in your state, you will greatly reduce the risk of those people voting in your election.”
Like Chmielinski, Cleta Mitchell sought to use conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting to advance unrelated political goals.
In addition to using the noncitizen voting pretext to prevent U.S. citizen students from using their college IDs to vote, Mitchell argued that state lawmakers should make it harder for all citizens to register to vote. “I think same-day registration is a huge problem for election integrity, especially in this area of protecting noncitizen voters,” she told lawmakers at the ALEC meeting.
The ALEC Committee’s “citizens-only-vote” policy also has implications for American citizens. The bill directs state election officials to compare voter rolls with other state and federal data sources, and to exclude voters who do not respond to a request to provide proof of citizenship. Mitchell also asserts that the bill “establishes documentary proof of citizenship for new registrations,” though that is not reflected in the language on the ALEC website.
Documentary proof of citizenship is a key component of the SAVE Act, a federal bill introduced by House Speaker Johnson that Mitchell, along with other members of the Citizens Only Vote coalition, helped craft. The bill, which Trump has endorsed, is an ode to the racist Great Replacement Theory, or the idea that Democrats are encouraging immigrants to come to the United States to add new voters of color, which would erode the influence of white Americans.
In his recent defense of the SAVE Act, Johnson claimed that Democrats’ opposition to the bill “reveals their intent to allow illegal aliens to vote,” demonstrating how this baseless conspiracy is being used to pressure lawmakers and score blatant partisan points in an election year.
But like the SAFE Act, a “citizens-only-vote” model policy raises several serious issues: First, nearly one in ten American citizens do not have easy access to documents that can prove citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, and would face significant obstacles to getting to the polls under these proposals.
Another issue is voter distraction. Even if someone has the necessary citizenship documents, making an extra trip to retrieve their passport from a bank deposit box, or requesting a birth certificate from a family member, can create unnecessary steps that could prevent some voters from registering to vote. Not to mention, voters can easily miss the mailed citizenship confirmation request and arrive at the polls on Election Day to find their registration has been removed from the voter rolls.
Ultimately, manufactured conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting are used to justify restrictive voting laws and mass voter purges that would undermine the freedom to vote for American citizens.
