# National Conference of State Legislatures The **National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL)** is the bipartisan membership organization of the fifty state legislatures, the territories and the District of Columbia, founded in 1975 and headquartered in Denver. It serves legislators and legislative staff rather than the public: research, bill tracking, model-practice comparison, training, and federal-relations advocacy on behalf of state legislatures as institutions. For this vault its importance is as a **source**, not as an actor. NCSL maintains the standing fifty-state surveys that most other coverage of state election law is downstream of — post-election audits, risk-limiting audits, canvass and certification deadlines, recount triggers, voter-ID requirements — and it publishes an election-administration legislative bulletin tracking enacted bills session by session. Several of the vault's structural maps rest on those tables, including [[Post-Election Audit Crosswalk]] and [[Election Canvass]]. Two cautions attach to using it. Its surveys are **snapshots with update dates**, and a table current in one month can misdescribe a state that is mid-phase-in of a statute. And its prose summaries and its own state lists occasionally disagree, so the lists are the citable artifact — a defect documented concretely in Note 1 of [[Post-Election Audit Crosswalk]]. Expand with: funding and governance structure, the Foundation for State Legislatures, its federal-relations positions, its relationship to ALEC and to the Council of State Governments, and its role in the post-2020 state election-law wave. This is a stub — created in the 2026-10-04 ASCII map build for [[Post-Election Audit Crosswalk]]. Expand as noted above. ## See Also - [[Post-Election Audit Crosswalk]] — the map built on its audit survey, and the source defect in Note 1 - [[Election Canvass]] · [[Election Certification]] · [[Recount]] — the terms whose state deadlines come from its tables - [[State Election Administration Tree]] — the offices its surveys describe - [[Verified Voting]] · [[Brennan Center for Justice]] — the other trackers the vault reconciles against