Register for webinar here
Sonni Waknin is the Program Manager of the UCLA Voting Rights Project and Voting Rights Counsel. Sonni believes that to ensure an equitable democracy, elections must be free, fair, and devoid of systemic racism. Voting is the right that preserves all other rights and must be defended. Waknin is responsible for managing all aspects of the Voting Rights Project, including the Project’s fellowship program and legal scholarship. She is currently counsel on Soto Palmer et al. v. Hobbs et al. and Portugal et al. v. Franklin County et al. She also recently defended the constitutionality of the Washington Voting Rights Act from a legal challenge. Waknin has wanted to be a voting rights litigator since she was in high school.
Previously, Waknin interned with the ACLU Voting Rights Project and for Common Cause’s National Redistricting Project. She holds her J.D. from UCLA School of Law, is an alumna of the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, and holds a B.A. from Rutgers University.Sophia Lin Lakin is the Director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, and assists in the planning, strategy and supervision of the ACLU’s voting rights litigation nationwide. Sophia has an active docket protecting voting rights and combatting voter suppression across the country and has led or worked on successful challenges to discriminatory voting laws in Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia. Currently, Sophia is lead counsel in Alpha Phi Alpha v. Raffensperger, a redistricting challenge to Georgia’s state legislative maps, Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment, a redistricting challenge to Arkansas’s state House plan, and the ACLU’s lead counsel in Sixth District of The African Methodist Episcopal Church v. Kemp, a federal lawsuit challenging multiple provisions of Georgia’s sweeping new voter suppression law S.B. 202. Her other cases have included: Common Cause Indiana v. Sullivan (lead counsel in case successfully challenging an unlawful purge program in Indiana); Hotze v. Hollins (co-lead counsel in case defending against attack on the use of drive-thru voting in Harris County, Texas); Trump Campaign v. Boockvar (represented voters against attempt to block certification of 2020 presidential election results); Texas v. Crystal Mason (representing Ms. Mason in her appeal of her conviction and 5-year sentence for allegedly improperly casting a provisional ballot). Sophia has testified on election law issues before Congress and has presented at conferences and conducted voting rights trainings nationwide. She is a frequent commentator on voting rights issues, appearing on television programs including The 11th Hour; and has written opinion pieces for The Hill and The Boston Globe. Sophia received her J.D. from Stanford Law School. She also received her M.S. in Management Science & Engineering and B.A. in Political Science from Stanford University.
Spencer Overton is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University and has researched, published, and taught extensively on democracy and race. He also directs the GW Equity Institute’s Multiracial Democracy Project, which serves as a bridge between scholars, policymakers, civil rights organizations, and democracy groups to tackle challenges like racialized disinformation, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. He is currently working on research projects related to the regulation of AI to facilitate a well-functioning multiracial democracy and the implications of alternative voting systems for multiracial democracy. Professor Overton held several senior leadership roles during the Obama campaign, transition, and Administration. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he led over 140 experts as chair of the campaign’s Government Reform Policy committee. On the transition, he chaired the Election Assistance Commission Agency Review Team, served on the Federal Election Commission Agency Review Team, and helped write the Administration’s ethics guidelines while serving in the office of the General Counsel. During the Administration, he was appointed as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice, and partnered with other senior officials in leading the Administration’s democracy policy efforts related to the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, the National Voter Registration Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Administration’s response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow unlimited corporate spending in federal elections. Professor Overton practiced law at the firm Debevoise & Plimpton, clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Damon J. Keith, and graduated with honors from both Hampton University and Harvard Law School.
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.
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.