Established in 1965, VRP has worked to protect the gains in political participation won by voters of color since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). Since its inception, the Voting Rights Project has litigated hundreds of voting rights cases, and has aggressively and successfully challenged efforts to suppress voting or to dilute minority voting strength.
The Project’s mission is to build and defend an accessible, inclusive, and equitable democracy free from racial discrimination. The Project has three principles: (1) all Americans should be eligible to vote; (2) voting should be free and easy; and (3) all people should count equally.
The Project employs an integrated advocacy approach, combining legislative advocacy, public education, and litigation, and has active cases in over a dozen states. Its recent docket has included:
- more than 30 lawsuits to protect voters during the 2020 election;
- a pair of cases in the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the last administration’s discriminatory census policies: Department of Commerce v. New York (successfully challenging an attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census), and Trump v. New York (challenging the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the population count used to apportion the House of Representatives);
- challenges to discriminatory congressional and state legislative maps, including two recent cases in the U.S. Supreme Court: Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP (2023), challenging South Carolina’s congressional map as an unconstitutional and starkly racially gerrymandered map; and Allen v. Milligan (2023), successfully challenging Alabama’s congressional map as unlawfully diluting the Black voting power under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act;
- challenges to voter purges and documentary proof of citizenship laws;
- and challenges to other new legislation restricting voting rights in states like Georgia and Texas.
The ACLU Voting Rights Project is currently litigating voter suppression and minority vote dilution cases in over a dozen states, from coast to coast, in every region of the country.
The ACLU Voting Rights Project is based at the ACLU National Office in New York, New York.
Staff of the Voting Rights Project
Sophia Lin Lakin, Director
Sarah Brannon, Deputy Director
Adriel I. Cepeda Derieux, Deputy Director
Davin Rosborough, Deputy Director
Theresa J. Lee, Senior Staff Attorney
Ari Savitzky, Senior Staff Attorney
Dayton Campbell-Harris, Staff Attorney
Ming Cheung, Staff Attorney
Megan Keenan, Staff Attorney
Jonathan Topaz, Staff Attorney
Jacob van Leer, Staff Attorney
Patricia Yan, Staff Attorney
Victoria Ochoa, Cozen Family Voting Rights Fellow
Clay Pierce, Equal Justice Works Fellow
Molly Garyantes, Paralegal
Makayla LaRonde-King, Paralegal
Destiny Ruiz, Paralegal
Amanda L. Scott, Paralegal
Back to the Voting Rights Project »