Marc E. Elias
Voting Access · Redistricting · Election Law
Election Law Against the Clock
Voting access, redistricting, and constitutional election litigation — Firm Chair, Elias Law Group, Washington, D.C.
All tactics must be on the table. This means legislating where we can, civic action and protests where we must, and litigation where there is no other alternative.
The Longest Count
Marc E. Elias has spent much of his career working against the election calendar. In November 2008, Minnesota's Senate race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman ended in a virtual tie out of nearly three million ballots cast. What followed was the longest recount and election contest in American history — months of ballot-by-ballot examination, absentee-envelope fights, a full trial before a three-judge panel, and an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court. Elias was lead counsel for Franken through all of it, and when the process finally ended the following summer, his client was seated by 312 votes. The case made his national reputation in election law, where the rules governing counting, canvassing and judicial review can determine the outcome long after the polls close.
Elias came to that arena from Suffern, New York, by way of Hamilton College — where a young lecturer named Bernie Sanders was among his teachers — and Duke University, which gave him both a master's degree in political science and a law degree. The combination proved prophetic: a political scientist's grasp of how power is organized, joined to a litigator's grasp of how it is contested. At Perkins Coie he built and led the nation's premier political law practice, serving as general counsel to John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign and Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, and counseling the Democratic Party's national committees, dozens of senators, governors, and House members through every variety of campaign-finance, ballot-access, and election dispute the modern system can generate.
Sixty-Four and One
The stress test came in November 2020, when the sitting president and his allies filed suit after suit seeking to overturn the results of a presidential election. Elias led the Democratic-side legal effort that met those cases in courtrooms across the battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada — an operation demanding rapid factual development on impossible timelines: whose ballots were challenged, how the disputed procedure actually operated, what state law required, and which form of relief remained available before canvassing or certification hardened the injury beyond repair. His teams prevailed in more than sixty cases, sixty-four of sixty-five by one common count. Those victories helped defend the scheduled certification of the presidential election under law against litigation seeking to overturn the result.
That same year, Elias founded Democracy Docket, a digital platform devoted to news, analysis, and opinion about voting rights and election litigation, which has grown into the leading source of its kind — a running public ledger of every consequential case in the field. In 2021 he left Perkins Coie to build something the American bar had not quite seen before: Elias Law Group, a firm organized around an explicit mission of helping Democrats win, citizens vote, and progressives make change. Elias has never presented election law as a neutral technical specialty; it is, in his practice, the legal front of a struggle over who participates in self-government, and his firm was built to fight that struggle at scale, with deep benches in litigation, campaign finance, and redistricting.
The Independent Legislature, Checked
The doctrinal stakes of that struggle peaked in Moore v. Harper. North Carolina's legislators asked the Supreme Court to embrace the "independent state legislature" theory in its maximal form — the claim that state legislatures hold virtually unchecked power over the rules of federal elections, beyond the reach of state constitutions and state courts. Had it prevailed, the theory would have stripped state judicial review from congressional maps and election statutes in every state at once. Elias was counsel in the litigation, and in June 2023 the Court rejected the maximal theory, confirming that state constitutions and state courts remain part of the framework governing federal elections. It was, in the estimation of scholars across the spectrum, one of the most consequential democracy rulings of the century so far — the preservation of a structural check that most Americans never knew was in danger.
The Supreme Court has been a recurring stage: Elias has argued there four times and won each time, in a career that also includes dozens of victories in state supreme courts and federal courts of appeals. In Cooper v. Harris he represented the voters who persuaded the Court that North Carolina's congressional districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. His state-court redistricting docket has produced new congressional or legislative maps in multiple states, litigated on behalf of voters and political organizations who would otherwise have spent a decade under lines drawn to predetermine their representation. And his recount and contest practice has extended well past Minnesota, representing Senate and House candidates in the high-wire post-election proceedings where a career — and a chamber majority — can turn on the treatment of a few hundred envelopes.
Long Strategy, Short Fuses
Elias pairs long strategy with short fuses. A redistricting case may unfold across multiple election cycles, through remedial hearings and successive maps; a ballot dispute may demand a record, a brief, and an argument within hours. In both registers, procedure is never peripheral. It is the mechanism through which lawful political voice is preserved in time — or lost before any court can act. He regards litigation as a defense against mass voter suppression, capable of buying time and holding ground while legislation, organizing and participation address what a judgment alone cannot repair.
In 2025, the White House issued a presidential memorandum singling Elias out by name for his election litigation. He remains firm chair of Elias Law Group and publisher and daily voice of Democracy Docket. For two decades, candidates, committees and voters have turned to him over challenged ballots, disputed maps and certification deadlines, seeking a remedy while a court can still provide effective relief.