Center for Election Confidence

Elliot Berke, President

The Washington Post described Elliot Berke as “one of Washington’s top Republican lawyers.” Burke was voted Republican Lawyer of the Year by the Republican National Lawyers Association in 2021. He served as counsel to former minority leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) from 2004 to 2006. DeLay was indicted for campaign finance violations in 2005, was forced to resign over the indictment, and was convicted of money laundering in 2010.

Berke served counsel to former Republican House Minority Leader and later Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as McCarthy faced pressure from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack for his role in the 2021 Capitol Riot. In this role, Berke has questioned the committee’s authority, as well as asked committee officials to turn over details about the investigation to McCarthy.

Berke has served as counsel for numerous Republicans who have been accused of unethical conduct or have been the subject of ethics probes, including Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX), Rep. Jim Hagedorn (R-MN), White House Communications Director Anthony Scarammuci, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), and former Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). Berke also reportedly gave major Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy legal advice after it was revealed Broidy “offered Russian gas giant Novatek a $26 million lobbying plan aimed at removing the company from a U.S. sanctions list.” 

Berke is also a member of the Board Of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, serves as the Special Assistant Attorney General for the State of Georgia, and is a member of a band called “The Deplorables.”

Ashlee Titus, Vice President and Secretary

According to her bio with the Center for Election Confidence, Ashlee Titus is an attorney with the firm Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, where she advises “individuals, businesses, candidates, political action committees (PACs), lobbyists, and trade associations on compliance with complex campaign finance and advertising, lobbying, and nonprofit tax exempt statutes and regulations.” 

Titus previously served as a staffer in the California State Legislature, and is a member of the Federalist Society. 

Lisa Dixon, Executive Director

Prior to working at CEC, Lisa Dixon served as the legal counsel to the Republican National Lawyers Association and worked as an associate at the conservative law firm Holtzman Vogel.

Mike Andrews, Treasurer

Mike Andrews was the long-time staff director and senior counsel to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. He is a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Litigation

CEC has been heavily engaged in legal efforts to curtail voting access. Specifically, CEC has:

• Filed a legal challenge to Pennsylvania’s no-excuse absentee voting law, which passed with bipartisan support and is popular with the voting public but has been opposed by Republicans since taking effect in the 2020 election. No-excuse absentee voting laws significantly expand access to voting by allowing anyone to vote absentee. The legal challenges to the law resembled those filed in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania.

• Filed an amicus brief in a case that aimed to defend North Carolina’s strict 2013 voter ID law. Federalist Society member and Trump administration official Maya Michelle Noronha worked on the amicus brief filed by CEC in support of the law. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center For Justice, the law would “have an outsized impact on the state’s growing African-American population.” A federal appeals court judge would strike down the law, saying it “target[ed] African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

• Supported the legal defense of another North Carolina voter ID law that was struck down in 2021 by a judge who claimed that “a Republican-dominated state legislature had rushed it to passage at least in part to make it harder for Black voters to cast ballots.” CEC appealed that decision to the Supreme Court after the state’s Republican legislature sued the Democratic Attorney General for not defending the law aggressively enough in court. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of CEC, allowing Republicans to defend the law in court.

• Filed a friend of the court brief in support of a North Carolina lawsuit that challenged the ability of courts to throw out redistricting plans put forward by state legislatures. The legal challenge coincides with the elevation of the Independent State Legislature Theory. The historical basis for the North Carolina legislature’s ISLT argument in part relies on a “well-known fake” American historical document that the legislature cites as proof that the framers of the constitution “intended to sweep aside the traditional checks and balances.” Adoption of an extreme version of ISLT would mean that state legislatures, and no other body, would have the sole authority to regulate federal elections. This would mean that voters across the nation would have no judicial remedy for partisan gerrymandering and threatens to “dramatically upend legal protections governing voting rights and redistricting.” This case is also strongly supported by other conservative groups such as the Honest Elections Project.

Opposition to Voting Accessibility

CEC stands against initiatives designed to make voting easier, more efficient, or more accessible, including:

• Automatic voter registration and mandatory voting, claiming AVR would bloat voter rolls and create more chances for mistakes to occur as voter data is handled by different agencies. CEC also opposes automatic voter registration with voter ID requirements. 

• Same-day voter registration and praised Montana for being the only state to repeal election-day voter registration. 

• Ranked choice voting, making spurious claims that it “violates the one-person, one-vote principle…undermines democratic principles, [and] disenfranchises some voters.”

• Arizona’s permanent early voting list, allows voters to apply to have early voting materials sent to them automatically without filing a request.

• Universal mail voting in the 2020 election. Universal mail voting has been shown to increase turnout without increasing partisan turnout or voter share. According to the leading think tank, the Brookings Institution, there is no evidence that mail voting increases the risk of fraud. The expansion of mail voting and absentee voting “massively increased turnout” in the 2020 election, according to a Science Advances academic paper.

CEC has pushed policies and rhetoric that disenfranchises voters. CEC:

• Pushes for automatic voter roll purges of inactive voters.

• Supports strict voter ID laws, which have been shown to disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters. 

• Said it “sees no greater threat to safe, honest, and secure elections” the expansion of mail voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting the debunked claims Donald Trump made about mail ballots in the run-up to and in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The National Conference of State Legislatures considers the processes behind mail voting the “gold standard of election security.”

• Supports initiatives that would make voting by mail and absentee ballots more difficult, including ID requirements, which have been shown to disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters. CEC also called for mail and absentee ballots to require sensitive personal information such as social security numbers, and to limit who is allowed to drop off an absentee ballot. 

• Absentee and mail ballots have been the subject of debunked far-right conspiracies that allege the 2020 election was stolen. Prior to the 2020 election, conservative officials coordinated to limit absentee and mail voting. Evidence at the time suggested Democrats were more likely than Republicans to vote absentee.

• Supports signature matching initiatives for absentee ballots. According to the ACLU, signature matching laws disproportionately impact minority groups, “especially voters with disabilities, elderly voters, trans voters, women voters, ESL voters and military voters.”

• Champions state cross-check systems, including Kansas’ Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, also known as Crosscheck. These programs attempt to use data from multiple states to look for voter fraud. Researchers looking into Crosscheck found in an instance that the program flagged 240,000 fraudulent voters but “well over 99 percent of the ‘matches’ sent […] were unlikely to have anything to do with even attempted voter fraud.” Crosscheck was also promoted by noted voter fraud conspiracist Kris Kobach and was put on hold in 2017 by the Department of Homeland Security for data breaches. The program was ultimately shut down in 2019.

Support of Restrictive Laws Passed After The 2020 Election:

CEC has thrown legal, and public support beyond numerous laws passed after the 2020 election that would restrict voting access – particularly regarding absentee ballots. CEC:

• Supported Florida’s SB 90 election bill that severely limited mail and absentee voting following the 2020 election. According to the League of Women Voters, the law would “have a disproportionate impact on elderly voters, voters with disabilities, students, and communities of color” and take away drop-box accessibility from working-class voters due to limiting their operation hours. The ACLU of Florida said the law would “make it harder for Floridians to cast a ballot by mail,” and pointed out that it added significantly more “unnecessary” administrative hurdles and would “[limit] voting access for elderly, working, and mobility-impaired Floridians.” 

• Filed a legal challenge to Pennsylvania’s no-excuse absentee voting law, which was passed with bipartisan support and is popular with the voting public but has been opposed by Republicans since taking effect in the 2020 election. No-excuse absentee voting laws significantly expand access to voting by allowing anyone to absentee vote. The legal challenges to the law resembled those filed in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania.

• Endorsed Iowa’s 2021 election law passed entirely on party lines following the 2020 election. The law cut Iowa’s early voting period, closed polls earlier, tightened the window for absentee ballots, limited who can return absentee ballots, limited counties to one absentee drop box, and significantly increased scrutiny on election auditors. According to the Des Moine Register, the law was part of a “national wave of Republican-led states whose leaders have expressed concerns about the integrity of the 2020 elections, taking the lead from former President Donald Trump, who falsely claimed the election was stolen from him.” 

Defended Georgia’s sweeping 2021 election law passed by Georgia’s Republican legislature after Democrats won multiple key elections in 2020–including the presidential and Senate elections. The New York Times called the law “a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections.” The law limited absentee ballot drop boxes, imposed increased oversight of county election boards, restricted provisional ballots, and made it illegal to offer food or water to voters in line. The law also decreased the timeline for runoff elections and limited the authority of the Secretary of State, who rebuffed efforts by Trump and Public Interest Legal Foundation chair Cleta Mitchell to overturn the popular vote in Georgia in 2020.

According to the watchdog organization, Center for Media And Democracy, CEC (then Lawyers Democracy Fund) received over $625,000 from 2018 to 2020 from the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, which CMD called “the biggest voter suppressor you’ve never heard of.” According to CMD, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation gave $3.7 million to 13 voter suppression groups from 2018 to 2020, including what was then known as Lawyers Democracy Fund.

Republican National Lawyers Association

CEC senior leaders Lisa Dixon, Mike Andrews, and Ashlee Titus are all members of the Republican National Lawyers Association. The RNLA is a prominent organization that coordinates efforts between Republican legal operatives and has played a key role in Republican presidential campaigns. Right-wing activist Cleta Mitchell is the former president of the RNLA. 

Mitchell is known for her legal activism around election laws and her belief in rampant voter fraud, a claim which has been called “a myth” by legal experts. Her former colleagues characterized her as the “fringe of the fringe” and someone who told, “clients what they wanted to hear, regardless of the law or reality.” She was a key Trump advisor during his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, notably participating in Trump’s infamous phone call where he pressured Georgia election officials to “find” exactly enough votes for him to win the state in 2020. She has since been subpoenaed by the House Committee investigating January 6th for her role in the insurrection as well as by a Fulton County, Georgia, special grand jury investigation concerning potential criminal interference in the election. Since the 2020 election, Mitchell has used her role at the Conservative Partnership Institute to coordinate right-wing efforts to undermine elections under the guise of ‘election integrity.’ At CPI summits, Mitchell aggressively trains right-wing activists, conspiracy theorists, and 2020 election deniers on how to “stake out election offices, file information requests, monitor voting, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work.”

Holtzman Vogel 

Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky is a boutique law firm that represents “some of the nation’s largest super PACs and their related nonprofits” on the conservative side. CEC Executive Director Lisa Dixon worked at the firm as an associate, and former CEC Secretary Tom Josefiak is a partner at the firm. Notable clients include the Karl Rove-led American Crossroads and the Koch connected Americans for Prosperity. The firm is also closely connected to numerous groups connected to right-wing activist Leonard Leo including the Honest Elections Project, the BH Fund, the Freedom and Opportunity Fund, and American Engaged among others. According to McClatchy, Holtzman Vogel “specializ[es] in creative legal maneuvers that allow donors to conservative causes to remain anonymous.” 

• With the influx of money in politics following the 2010 Citizens United decision, Holtzman Vogel “became one of the premiere legal shops to help the PACs distribute their largesse.”

• Holtzman Vogel employs many longtime Republican operatives. Founder, partner, and namesake of the firm Jill Holtzman Vogel is a Republican state Senator in Virginia currently serving her fourth term. Vogel has been described as a “dark-money superlawyer” by the Washington Post.