Daniella Ballou-Aares is the Founder and CEO of the Leadership Now Project, a national membership organization of business and thought leaders committed to fixing American democracy. Daniella began her career at Bain & Company, working across the firm’s offices in the US, South Africa and the UK. From there she became a founding Partner at Dalberg, where she led the Americas business and transformed the startup into the largest social impact strategy firm with 25 offices worldwide. She spent five years in the Obama Administration as the Senior Advisor for Development to the Secretary of State, serving under Secretaries Clinton and Kerry. Daniella’s perspectives have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Fast Company, POLITICO, and the World Economic Forum, among others. Daniella is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a 2014 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MPA from the Kennedy School and graduated cum laude from Cornell with a BS in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering.
Richard Eidlin has worked for more than thirty-five years at the intersection of business, politics, and policy. His career has spanned the private, public, and nonprofit sectors, domestically and internationally, and involved a range of leading edge issues, including sustainable economy, democracy, and clean energy. He has served as Business for America’s Policy and Membership Director since 2018. In 2009, he co-founded the American Sustainable Business Council and served as vice president for policy for ten years. In that role Richard directed membership and led state and national advocacy campaigns on the environment, energy, regulatory reform, campaign finance, and economic development issues. Richard directed ASBC’s work on Capitol Hill and with the Obama administration. Previously, Richard served as the business outreach director for the Apollo Alliance, advocating for federal and state clean energy and job creation policies. In the 1980’s, he worked for five years as a senior troubleshooter for New York City government in two departments, focusing on identifying potential corruption and mismanagement. Beginning in the early 1990’s, he devoted ten years to growing the US solar energy industry, building sales networks and advocating for state and federal legislation and regulations to create new markets. From 1995–2000, Richard led training seminars for Fortune 1000 companies for Boston College’s Center for Corporate Citizenship. In 2007–2008, he co-directed the Colorado Cleantech for Obama campaign and helped craft gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter’s “New Energy Economy” strategy. Richard served an adjunct faculty at the University of Denver on Environmental Policy and Sustainability for 12 years.
Ben Ginsberg is the Volker Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a nationally known political law advocate representing participants in the political process. His clients have included political parties, political campaigns, candidates, members of Congress and state legislatures, governors, corporations, trade associations, political action committees (PACs), vendors, donors, and individuals. He represented four of the last six Republican presidential nominees. Ginsberg’s representations have ranged across a variety of election law and regulatory issues, including voting issues and elections, federal and state campaign finance laws, recounts and contests, government investigations, election administration, and redistricting. He served as cochair of the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration, which produced a much-lauded report on best practices and recommendations for state and local officials to make US elections run better. His academic background includes being a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School, an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, and a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. Currently a CNN contributor, he appears frequently on television as an on-air commentator about politics and the law and has written numerous articles on US politics. He served as national counsel to the 2000 and 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaigns and played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount. In 2012 and 2008, he served as national counsel to the Romney for President campaign. He has represented the campaigns and leadership PACs of numerous members of the Senate and House as well as national party committees, governors, and state officials. He was a partner at Jones Day from 2014 to 2020 and, before that, at Patton Boggs for 23 years.
Richard Pildes is one of the nation’s leading scholars of constitutional law and a specialist in legal issues concerning democracy. A former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, he has been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, and has also received recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Scholar. President Biden appointed him to the President’s Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. In dozens of articles and his acclaimed casebook, The Law of Democracy, he has helped create an entirely new field of study in the law schools. His work in this field systematically explores legal and policy issues concerning the structure of democratic elections and institutions, such as the role of money in politics, the design of election districts, the regulation of political parties, the structure of voting systems, the representation of minority interests in democratic institutions, and similar issues. He has written on the rise of political polarization in the United States, the transformation of the presidential nominations process, the Voting Rights Act (including editing a book titled The Future of the Voting Rights Act), the dysfunction of America’s political processes, the role of the Supreme Court in overseeing American democracy, and the powers of the American President and Congress. In addition to his scholarship in these areas, he has written on national-security law, the design of the regulatory state, and American constitutional history and theory. As a lawyer, Pildes has successfully argued voting-rights and election-law cases before the United States Supreme Court and the courts of appeals, and as a well-known public commentator, he writes frequently for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and was part of the Emmy-nominated NBC breaking-news team for coverage of the 2000 Bush v. Gore contest.
Renée DiResta is the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies. Renee investigates the spread of narratives across social and media networks, with an interest in understanding how platform algorithms and affordances intersect with user behavior and factional crowd dynamics. She studies how actors leverage the information ecosystem to exert influence, from domestic activists promoting health misinformation and conspiracy theories, to the full-spectrum information operations executed by state actors. At the behest of SSCI, Renee led an investigation into the Russian Internet Research Agency’s multi-year effort to manipulate American society, and presented public testimony. A year later, she led an additional investigation into influence capabilities that the GRU used alongside its hack-and-leak operations in the 2016 election. Renee has studied influence operations and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorist activity, and state-sponsored information warfare, and has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civil society, and business organizations on the topic. Renée regularly writes and speaks about technology policy, and influence operations. She is an Ideas contributor at Wired and The Atlantic. Her tech industry writing, analysis, talks, and data visualizations have been featured or covered by numerous media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Yale Review, Fast Company, Politico, TechCrunch, Wired, Slate, Forbes, Buzzfeed, The Economist, Journal of Commerce, and more. She appeared in the documentary The Social Dilemma.
Kate Klonick is an Associate Professor at St. John's University Law School, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, Harvard Berkman Klein Center and a Distinguished Scholar at the Institute for Humane Studies. Her writing on online speech, freedom of expression, and private internet platform governance has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post and numerous other publications. For the 2023-2024 academic year, she is a Fulbright Schuman Innovation Scholar in the European Union where she is a Visiting Professor at SciencesPo and University of Amsterdam researching and writing about the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
Charles Stewart III is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, where he has taught since 1985, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research and teaching areas include congressional politics, elections, and American political development. His current research about Congress touches on the historical development of committees, origins of partisan polarization, and Senate elections. His recent books of congressional research include Electing the Senate (2014, with Wendy J. Schiller), Fighting for the Speakership (2012, with Jeffery A. Jenkins), and Analyzing Congress (2nd ed., 2011). Since 2001, Professor Stewart has been a member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, a leading research effort that applies scientific analysis to questions about election technology, election administration, and election reform. He is currently the MIT director of the project. Professor Stewart is an established leader in the analysis of the performance of election systems and the quantitative assessment of election performance. Working with the Pew Charitable Trusts, he helped with the development of Pew’s Elections Performance Index. Professor Stewart also provided advice to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His research on measuring the performance of elections and polling place operations is funded by Pew, the Democracy Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation. He recently published The Measure of American Elections (2014, with Barry C. Burden).
Kim Wyman, a Senior Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), is a nationally recognized leader in election administration. She served as Washington Secretary of State for nearly a decade and is only the second Republican woman in state history to be elected to statewide office. Secretary Wyman was appointed by President Joe Biden to serve as a Senior Election Security Advisor at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. She began her 30-year career in elections as the Thurston County Elections Director and served as the elected Thurston County Auditor. A graduate of California State University Long Beach, Wyman earned a Master of Public Administration degree from Troy State University. She co-authored Elections 2020: Controlling Chaos with her husband, John Wyman.
Professor Richard L. Hasen is an internationally recognized expert in
election law, writing as well in the areas of legislation and statutory
interpretation, remedies, and torts. He is co-author of leading
casebooks in election law and remedies. Hasen served in 2020 as a CNN
Election Law Analyst and as an NBC News/MSNBC Election Law Analyst in
2022. He directs UCLA Law’s Safeguarding Democracy Project.
From 2001-2010, he served (with Dan Lowenstein) as founding co-editor of
the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal. He is
the author of over 100 articles on election law issues, published in
numerous journals including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review,
and Supreme Court Review. He was elected to The American Law
Institute in 2009 and serves as Reporter (with Professor Douglas
Laycock) on the ALI’s law reform project: Restatement (Third) of Torts:
Remedies. He also is an adviser on the Restatement (Third) of Torts:
Concluding Provisions.
His op-eds and commentaries have appeared in many publications,
including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post,
Politico, and Slate. Hasen also writes the often-quoted Election Law
Blog, which the ABA Journal named to its “Blawg 100 Hall of Fame” in
2015. The Green Bag recognized his 2018 book, The Justice of
Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption, for
exemplary legal writing, and his 2016 book, Plutocrats United, received
a Scribes Book Award Honorable Mention. His 2022 book, Cheap Speech: How
Disinformation Poisons Our Politics—and How to Cure It, was named one
of the four best books on disinformation by the New York Times. His new
book, A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard
American Democracy, will be published by Princeton University Press in
February 2024.
Ryan J. Reilly is a Justice reporter for NBC News. Previously, he was the senior justice reporter for HuffPost, where he covered the Justice Department and the FBI for more than a decade. He was 2017 Livingston Award finalist for his reporting on jail deaths, and has appeared on a variety of television programs, including The Situation Room, The Lead with Jake Tapper, Reliable Sources, All In with Chris Hayes, The Rachel Maddow Show, and American Voices with Alicia Mendendez. He lives in Washington, DC.
Professor Richard L. Hasen is an internationally recognized expert in
election law, writing as well in the areas of legislation and statutory
interpretation, remedies, and torts. He is co-author of leading
casebooks in election law and remedies. Hasen served in 2020 as a CNN
Election Law Analyst and as an NBC News/MSNBC Election Law Analyst in
2022. He directs UCLA Law’s Safeguarding Democracy Project.
From 2001-2010, he served (with Dan Lowenstein) as founding co-editor of
the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal. He is
the author of over 100 articles on election law issues, published in
numerous journals including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review,
and Supreme Court Review. He was elected to The American Law
Institute in 2009 and serves as Reporter (with Professor Douglas
Laycock) on the ALI’s law reform project: Restatement (Third) of Torts:
Remedies. He also is an adviser on the Restatement (Third) of Torts:
Concluding Provisions.
His op-eds and commentaries have appeared in many publications,
including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post,
Politico, and Slate. Hasen also writes the often-quoted Election Law
Blog, which the ABA Journal named to its “Blawg 100 Hall of Fame” in
2015. The Green Bag recognized his 2018 book, The Justice of
Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption, for
exemplary legal writing, and his 2016 book, Plutocrats United, received
a Scribes Book Award Honorable Mention. His 2022 book, Cheap Speech: How
Disinformation Poisons Our Politics—and How to Cure It, was named one
of the four best books on disinformation by the New York Times. His new
book, A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard
American Democracy, will be published by Princeton University Press in
February 2024.