A legislator affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) who served as a fake elector from Arizona during the 2020 presidential election is proposing legislation that state lawmakers — not voters — should get the final say on choosing Arizona’s presidential electors.
The bill’s sponsor, state Senator Anthony Kern (R-27), is currently under investigation by Arizona’s Attorney General for falsely certifying that then-President Trump had won the state’s Electoral College votes in 2020 instead of Joe Biden. Kern won his bid for state senator in 2022 with Trump’s endorsement and is now a member of Arizona’s state Freedom Caucus.
Kern has been a member of ALEC, the corporate bill mill, since at least 2016 and has served as a member of its Federalism and International Relations task force.
While a former state representative, he was listed as a speaker at the Stop the Steal rally in Washington on January 6, participated in the insurrection, promoted it on social media, and subsequently lied about his level of involvement.
Kern’s bill, SCR 1014, would upend Arizona’s electoral system by awarding state lawmakers the power to appoint presidential electors regardless of which candidate wins the popular vote.
It does not appear that ALEC has drafted any model bills proposing that state lawmakers take control of selecting presidential electors, and no resolutions with similar language appear to have been introduced in other state legislatures.
However, the organization has a long history of promoting the supremacy of states’ rights in its attempts to both erode federal protections and oversight as well as crush local democracy. ALEC’s legacy has been to consolidate power in the hands of state lawmakers rather than the citizens they serve.
Even in its January 2021 statement condemning the violent attack on the Capitol, ALEC made clear its stance about state sovereignty over electors: “The 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is clear — only the states have the authority to appoint electors,” the statement reads.
This corresponds neatly with ALEC’s embrace of the radical “independent state legislature doctrine,” which holds that state courts don’t have the authority to review state election laws. If the doctrine had been embraced by the Supreme Court — which rejected it last year despite strong support from ALEC and other voter suppression groups — heavily gerrymandered state legislatures effectively would have been empowered to determine election outcomes.
Moreover — and in stark contrast to ALEC’s statement, which unequivocally condemned the violence on Jan. 6 — ALEC has openly celebrated the Trump loyalists who stormed the Capitol and delivered that infamous day of chaos. In July 2022, ALEC honored Arizona Senate President Karen Fann (R), who was its national chair at the time, at a members-only reception. The recognition came just a month after the U.S. Department of Justice had subpoenaed her as part of its criminal investigation of the insurrection.
In 2021, Fann also became the face of the disastrous and partisan Maricopa County election audit.
ALEC’s Campaign to Erode Direct Election of Senators
ALEC’s drive to erode citizens’ control over their federal representatives has gone as far as a campaign to repeal the 17th Amendment, which provides for the direct election of U.S. Senators. This constitutional amendment was ratified in 1913 as part of the progressive era response to political corruption and corporate control of party bosses in the early 20th century.
In 2017, ALEC introduced a model bill in the form of a resolution for states to submit to Congress demanding that the 17th Amendment be repealed. “The 17th Amendment has had many unintended consequences including runaway federal deficits, unfunded mandates, overreach by federal agencies and excessive and burdensome impositions by the federal government upon the States,” the resolution reads.
The goal of such a repeal is clear. Since Republicans control the majority of state legislatures, if state lawmakers were to choose who should represent them in the U.S. Senate, Democratic senators in states such as Arizona, Montana, and Wisconsin could be ousted.
Unlike ALEC’s campaign urging states to call for a constitutional convention, the movement to push for the repeal of the 17th Amendment has been limited. Only Utah has passed a resolution along the lines of what ALEC seeks, though resolutions to rescind 100-year-old legislative ratifications of the amendment have been introduced by Republicans in other states, including Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming.
This topic and the utter nastiness of ALEC need to be much more publicized.