About
Lisa Nelson has served as CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) since 2014. Prior to that, she worked as a lobbyist for Visa and was the managing partner of Ulysses Consulting, Inc., where she specialized in “issue-based legislative and regulatory efforts” and “government and corporate relations.” From 1998 to 2005, Nelson managed a team of both federal and state policy lobbyists for AOL and Time Warner.
Before her career as a corporate lobbyist, Nelson worked in politics as a public affairs liaison for former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), and as the executive director of the Republican training organization GOPAC. She boasts in her bio that in 1994 she led “the campaign effort [to win] the first Majority in Congress for Republicans in over 40 years.”
Nelson also wrote for the National Review, and founded the National Review Institute.
In 2018 the Trump administration invited Nelson to serve as a commissioner for the White House Fellows Program. In July 2019, she attended a “listening session with women leaders” at the White House with Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s “counselor.”
Nelson has said that ALEC’s role is to put “state legislators in touch with businesses and others who want to push pro-growth policies.” She also notes that it “often writes model legislation that legislators can adapt.”
January 6, 2021
- At a Council for National Policy (CNP) meeting in February 2020 Nelson said that she was working with GOP attorneys to put together “action items that legislators can take to question the validity of an election.” She added that “obviously we all want President Trump to win and win the national vote. But it’s very clear from all the comments and all the suggestions up front that really what it comes down to is the states and the state legislators.”
- According to a video from the meeting, Nelson identified the attorneys working on the “action items” as Hans Von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, former Federal Elections Commission (FEC) member Bradley Smith, and Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell, who later became intimately involved in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and participated in his infamous call pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes for him to win in Georgia.
- In addition to Nelson, many other ALEC leaders played a role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election. For example, Seth Grove, a Pennsylvania state representative and ALEC board member, garnered over 60 signatures of state legislators claiming that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) had “undermined” the election.
- According to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), at least 38 state legislators affiliated with ALEC played a part in attempting to overturn the election results.
- CMD also identified over 40 ALEC alumni in federal government who had a hand in the push to overturn the 2020 election.
The Big Lie
- ALEC members and alumni in state and federal government spread the lie that the election had been compromised by widespread fraud.
Election Audits
- ALEC members across the country pushed for partisan audits of the 2020 election. Arizona Senate President Karen Fann (R), for example, an ALEC board treasurer, spearheaded the partisan “audit” in Maricopa County.
Post-2020 Election Subversion
- Nelson is a member of ALEC’s secretive “process working group,” an internal committee that focuses on elections.