Delaney Barker

The Project

Delaney (she/her) provides legal representation and advocacy for Michigan’s low-income and minority voters to access absentee or in-person ballots without intimidation and tactics intended to subvert election results.

During the 2022 election, partisan operatives trained poll workers and poll watchers to accuse individuals of voter fraud and escalate the situation by calling the police with the apparent intention of sending them to flood high-minority areas to disrupt elections and harass voters. Delaney’s project seeks to combat new forms of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement that disproportionately target low-income voters and voters of color.

Fellowship Plans

Building on the ACLU of Michigans work protecting voters, Delaney will sue individuals and organizations seeking to suppress the vote of marginalized voters and election clerks who threaten voters’ access to absentee ballots or early voting. Additionally, she will work with grassroots organizers and partner organizations to engage with clerks statewide and ensure that voters can exercise their right to an absentee ballot or early voting. During her fellowship, Delaney will also litigate on behalf of voters who have been intimidated by poll watchers or other actors.

The Project

Through the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Grace (they/them) supports eligible incarcerated voters to build power and voting access structures in jurisdictions without jail-based absentee ballot access through advocacy, coalition building, and impact litigation.

Over 480,000 incarcerated people on any given day are detained pre-trial, most of whom are eligible voters, as they are not serving felony convictions during their incarceration. Although a handful of jails allow people to vote in person inside their facilities, most voters across the nation can only vote through absentee ballots. Yet since 2021, at least nineteen states have passed restrictive absentee ballot legislation. These restrictions effectively make it even harder for an incarcerated person to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

Fellowship Plans

During their Fellowship, Grace will advocate for incarcerated voters in states where restrictive absentee voting laws create barriers to jail-based voting access. Grace will use community lawyering methods to collaborate with local organizations and advocates, county officials, and incarcerated voters and build local power through sustainable coalition-building. Grace will lead educational campaigns for county officials and incarcerated voters to create local programs inside jails, provide voters with direct services, and devise litigation strategies when advocacy efforts are insufficient.

Grace’s experiences watching their older sister being unable to exercise her right to vote while in jail—despite being an eligible voter—fuels their work for incarcerated populations. Their sister’s eventual disenfranchisement propelled them before and throughout law school to support voters in a local jail in Austin, Texas vote.

The Project

Conner’s project at Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights will address polling place closures and last-minute changes to expand voting access and combat disenfranchisement for Chicago’s low-income communities of color.

Late polling place changes, closures, and consolidations make it harder for already marginalized groups—including voters of color, low-income voters, disabled voters, elderly voters, and voters with limited English proficiency—to access the ballot on Election Day. In the past few years, Chicago voters have experienced a drastic reduction in the number of available polling places, with polling place changes often occurring close to elections, making it nearly impossible for the changes to be challenged or for voters to learn about how they have been impacted. These changes and closures often lead to longer lines, increased transportation costs, and confusion over where to cast a ballot—all of which disenfranchise many otherwise eligible voters.

Fellowship Plans

Conner will work directly with the communities most impacted by polling place changes and closures by leading know-your-rights campaigns and engaging with community partners to reduce confusion over where to cast a ballot. He will also advocate for election officials to equitably select polling locations and ensure they are accessible for Black, Latinx, and Asian voters—particularly on Chicago’s South and West Sides. Additionally, Conner will strategically use public records requests and develop litigation templates to facilitate quick responses to potential voting rights violations.

Conner’s belief that all communities deserve political representation strengthens his commitment to protecting the roots of the democratic process through voting rights and election administration work. He was born and raised in the Midwest and is excited to return as an Equal Justice Works Fellow.

Media

The Project

Anna (she/her) will combat the independent state legislature theory by leading the Constitutional Accountability Center’s first Election Amicus Project and filing amicus briefs in courts across the country in litigation surrounding the 2024 election.

The independent state legislature theory (ISLT) is the latest threat to multiracial democracy. ISLT posits that under the Constitution, the state legislature is the only state body with the power to regulate federal elections, and therefore, state courts cannot intervene to enforce state voting rights protections. Under the logic of ISLT, federal courts are the only check on states’ voter suppression—which, given the federal judiciary’s growing hostility to voting rights, is frightening.

In 2023, the Supreme Court will address ISLT head-on in Moore v. Harper, which has been called “without question the most significant case in the history of our nation for American democracy.” Whatever the Court decides in Moore, the questions it leaves open will be heavily litigated as states attempt to use ISLT to disenfranchise voters before the 2024 election.

Fellowship Plans

During her Fellowship, Anna will spearhead the Constitutional Accountability Center’s first Election Amicus Project targeted at protecting voting rights during an election year. She will strategically draft and file amicus briefs in courts across the country to limit ISLT’s impact on the 2024 election. Anna will also publish a white paper on ISLT aimed at educating lawyers, scholars, and organizers about ISLT.

Coming from an immigrant family, Anna understands the power of being able to participate in our democracy. She is dedicated to ensuring that marginalized communities can exercise their right to vote.

The Project

Rachel’s (she/her/hers) project seeks to protect voters of color and language minority voters from intimidation and ensures their access to the ballot box for the 2024 election through public education, policy advocacy, and litigation.

Voter intimidation is on the rise in the U.S. Intimidation occurred historically through physical and economic threats to prevent people of color from depositing ballots. Today, voter intimidation is more varied and covert but no less pernicious, breeding distrust in our democratic system. For example, during the 2020 election, extremists sent robocalls to thousands of Black voters, claiming that voting by mail would lead to arrests, collection for outstanding debts, and tracking by the Center for Disease Control. Unsurprisingly, voter intimidation was one of the top three complaints fielded by the Election Protection Hotline for the 2020 election. This trend will likely intensify in anticipation of the 2024 Presidential Election.

Recognizing the foundational nature of voting and how access to the ballot box impacts basic civil liberties, Rachel became committed to practicing as a voting rights attorney.

Fellowship Plans

During her Fellowship, Rachel will build community voter power using tools, like Know Your Rights workshops, to help voters identify and report illegal conduct and assert their rights against voter intimidation. Rachel will help deter bad actors by creating credible threats of civil and criminal enforcement against voter intimidation by providing direct representation to voters that face discriminatory intimidation and by advocating for policy changes at the state level. Finally, she will create a report on current voter intimidation tactics to update an important source of information about a modern election sabotage threat.

The Project

Alton (he/him/his) promotes fair redistricting maps by addressing partisan gerrymandering through research, litigation, and policy advocacy.

For communities of color to be adequately represented in state legislatures and Congress, electoral districts must be drawn in a manner that gives their inhabitants a safe-guarded right to vote for their candidates of choice. Yet, politicians in state legislatures are increasingly passing partisan redistricting maps that overwhelmingly benefit themselves and their political parties, thereby limiting the ability of voters to elect candidates that reflect their needs and desires. We need an equitable system that empowers voters to choose their politicians, instead of politicians choosing their voters. Although federal courts are largely foreclosed from considering partisan gerrymandering, opportunities exist to challenge partisan maps at the state level. Voters deserve a fair process only reachable by reforms to how district lines are drawn today.

Fellowship Plans

During his Fellowship, Alton will support ongoing and future partisan gerrymandering litigation through the development of novel and deeply effective litigation strategies. Further, he will bolster efforts at the state level to implement independent redistricting commissions, which would move the power of redistricting from politicians’ hands into the hands of voters. Alton will also work to produce state-by-state legal research on how local laws may be used to litigate partisan gerrymandering claims moving forward.

Media

The Project

Chris will use litigation, state and local administrative advocacy, education, and monitoring to challenge administrative disenfranchisement in the electoral process.

Chris’ project challenges “administrative disenfranchisement,” reframing election administration issues from harmless administrative errors to serious barriers in the democratic process. Mistakes in election administration are popularly conceived (to the extent they are conceived at all) as harmless scriveners’ errors that balance out in all but the closest elections, which are protected by careful and deliberate recounts. But in reality, these administrative disenfranchisements pose a threat to voting rights, which is disproportionately experienced in communities of color and poor communities. These problems are often baked in well in advance of an election, through decisions made for administrative convenience, without considering how they will impact the voters whom they are meant to serve.

Fellowship Plans

Chris will use a variety of legal strategies, including public records requests, trainings for community groups and elections staff, administrative advocacy, and litigation, in combination with well-established relationships with community groups and election administrators alike, to ensure that the experiences and needs of voters are factored into the decision-making calculus for designing and administering election systems.

The Project

Uruj (she/her/hers) will use model litigation and advocacy to challenge the coordinated assault on the right to vote by discriminatory voting laws in the Deep South.

In 2021, state legislatures met the historic turnout of Black voters and voters of color in 2020 with a backlash of voter suppression laws aimed at diminishing the political power of voters of color. Nineteen states enacted 33 restrictive voting laws in 2021 alone; forty-nine states cumulatively proposed over 425 bills to restrict voting access. From imposing harsher voter ID requirements on absentee ballots in Georgia to restricting mail-in voting in Florida or banning 24-hour voting in Texas, these sudden and extreme changes to voting laws have the intent and effect of making voting more burdensome for low-income voters of color. Characterized as Jim Crow 2.0, these laws deepen historical inequities in voting access, abridge or deny voters of color a meaningful opportunity to participate in the political process, and throw off the guardrails necessary to maintain our democracy.

Fellowship Plans

This project supports the leadership of impacted communities safeguarding against Jim Crow 2.0 policies and ensuring equal access to the vote. Building on the momentum of the 2022 midterm election, Uruj will apply a multi-part strategy to ensure that every eligible voter, especially Black voters, can freely exercise their fundamental right to vote by starting in two priority jurisdictions in the deep south. The strategy uses strategic, targeted litigation to enforce voting rights protections under federal and state constitutional and statutory protections; rapid response advocacy at polling stations by monitoring for suppression and identifying organizing and legal interventions; and advocating for expansive legislation and against restrictive voting bills in partnership with grassroots coalitions.

Media

The Project

Casey (she/her/hers) will mount the first nationwide affirmative effort to mitigate the criminal and immigration consequences of attempting to cast a ballot.

After recent elections, many states, including North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, have prosecuted dozens of people for allegedly casting ballots while ineligible to do so. As a result, many people, especially people of color, face extreme consequences like incarceration and deportation for casting ballots while not knowing they were disenfranchised. For example, current ACLU clients Ms. Crystal Mason and Mr. Hervis Rogers face multi-year prison sentences for allegedly trying to vote when Texas considered them ineligible under its felon disenfranchisement laws. This growing wave of unjust voter prosecution creates fear and suppresses voter turnout among minority communities.

Fellowship Plans

Casey will contribute to the defense of individuals wrongfully prosecuted for voting. She will build capacity among defense and immigration lawyers to represent people charged with voting unlawfully. Casey will also file impact litigation to challenge statutes that impose harsh penalties upon people who try to vote not realizing they are ineligible to do so.

Media

The Project

Kevin (he/him/his) advocates on behalf of incarcerated people in Kentucky and communities affected by prison gerrymandering to stop the use of the criminal justice system as a means of disenfranchising voters.

The criminal justice system is often used as a tool to disenfranchise voters. Incarceration-based disenfranchisement occurs in many forms, including impeding people in pre-trial detention from voting and shifting political power away from communities through prison gerrymandering. There are an estimated 21,000 pre-trial detainees in Kentucky, each of whom has the constitutional right to vote, but many are nevertheless unable to vote due to poor jail administration. Moreover, the Kentucky legislature has continually used prisons to egregiously gerrymander the state.

These forms of political disempowerment are under scrutinized but must be addressed. Kentuckians need a comprehensive program that will integrate direct services, policy advocacy, and litigation to make jailhouse voting more accessible and end prison gerrymandering.

Kevin is motivated by his many family reunions in Kentucky, his childhood in the South, and the overwhelming need to expand the right to vote at this critical, historical moment.

Fellowship Plans

During his Fellowship, Kevin will work directly with incarcerated people in pre-trial detention to register incarcerated voters and help them vote absentee. He will engage in advocacy to improve jail practices, advance prison gerrymandering policy, and publish policy reports. Finally, he will commence litigation to end prison gerrymandering in Kentucky and ensure jails comply with their constitutional duties.