Sophia Lin Lakin
Voting Rights · Redistricting · Ballot Access
Voting Rights Before the Next Election
Voting rights, redistricting, and ballot-access litigation — Director, ACLU Voting Rights Project, New York.
At a time when our democracy is under unprecedented attack, our work is even more urgent.
Drawn Before It Is Cast
Political power is drawn before it is cast — into maps, databases, and administrative rules — and Sophia Lin Lakin represents the voters on the losing end of the pen. Her practice joins demographic evidence, district design, election procedure, and constitutional doctrine, often on the unforgiving clock of an approaching election, when a remedy must be both legally sound and operationally possible before another unlawful map or barrier governs the vote. As director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project, she now supervises that work nationwide: the trial teams, the emergency motions, the expert reports, the long redistricting sagas that outlast the political cycles that produced them.
Lakin came to the work through both political science and engineering. At Stanford she earned a bachelor's degree in political science and then a master's in management science and engineering — training in systems analysis that informs her work with polarized-voting statistics, demographic modeling, and the operational mechanics of election administration. A serious health condition in those years pushed her toward work she cared about, and a law school internship at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund introduced her to the field she would make her own. After her Stanford law degree she clerked twice in New York's federal courts — for Judge Carol Bagley Amon of the Eastern District of New York and Judge Raymond J. Lohier, Jr. of the Second Circuit — before joining the ACLU's Voting Rights Project in 2013. She rose through every rank of the project: staff attorney, deputy director, interim co-director, and, in September 2023, director, succeeding Dale Ho when he left for the federal bench. The ACLU's national legal director introduced her to the country as "brilliant, fierce, caring, and diplomatic," a lawyer of "grace under pressure" — the temperament the docket demands.
Alabama, Proved
The case that displays her craft most completely is Allen v. Milligan. Alabama's 2021 congressional map packed and cracked Black voters — more than a quarter of the state's population — into a single district of seven. Lakin helped lead the ACLU's litigation, part of a coalition with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, that built the record proving unlawful vote dilution under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act: racially polarized voting quantified, reasonably configured alternative districts drawn, the state's political history assembled into evidence. In June 2023 the Supreme Court affirmed the preliminary finding that the map likely violated Section 2 — a result that surprised nearly every court-watcher and preserved, at that moment, the central framework for proving vote dilution. The remedial map that followed created a second district in which Black voters have a meaningful opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, and in 2024 Alabama sent two Black-preferred representatives to Congress for the first time in its history. A statistical showing became a map; a map became representation.
The same evidentiary discipline runs through the rest of her redistricting docket. She served as lead counsel in Alpha Phi Alpha v. Raffensperger, the challenge to Georgia's post-2020 maps that produced a federal trial judgment ordering new districts. She was on the trial team in Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Jaeger, which won a Section 2 judgment and remedial North Dakota legislative districts for Native voters in time for the 2024 elections — a case litigated across reservation communities where the distances are long and the margins of political survival thin. And she has served as counsel in Nairne v. Landry, the Louisiana legislative-map case in which a federal trial court found unlawful dilution of Black voting strength, part of her continuing work for Louisiana's Black voters in litigation that is still unfolding as the courts rework the doctrine around it.
The Count Itself
Before the maps can be fought, the count must be defended, and Lakin's docket reaches that deeper layer too. She worked on the litigation that became Department of Commerce v. New York, the successful challenge to the addition of an untested citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The Supreme Court held the government's stated rationale pretextual, and the question was withdrawn — a result that protected the accuracy of the population count on which a decade of representation, redistricting, and public resources would rest. Households afraid to answer a census taker do not disappear from the country; they only disappear from the numbers, and from every allocation the numbers control. Keeping them counted was as consequential as any district line.
That instinct — to find the administrative chokepoint where political voice can be quietly narrowed — now defines her project's newest generation of cases. She is lead counsel in the pending challenge to the 2025 executive order that sought to impose documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements on federal voter registration, litigation in which a federal court blocked the documentary-proof provision while the case proceeds. She is lead counsel in the challenge to Georgia's S.B. 202 and its restrictions on the mechanics of voting, and she has pressed Section 2 claims for Black Arkansans challenging that state's legislative maps. Registration forms, drop boxes, provisional-ballot rules, proof requirements — each is a technical instrument that can be tuned to exclude, and each, in her hands, becomes a record a court can act on.
Racing the Clock
A map case, as Lakin litigates it, is a trial of proof: polarized-voting analysis, community boundaries, legislative sequence, the feasibility of an alternative configuration. She assembles those pieces into a clear showing of how exclusion was engineered — and a workable route to correct it before one more election is run under the unlawful lines. Election deadlines constrain the available remedy: a new map must be ready for officials to administer before voters go to the polls. Her engineering training informs that attention to implementation throughout the litigation.
She has carried that expertise beyond the courtroom, testifying before Congress on election law and the state of the Voting Rights Act, training voting-rights lawyers across the country, and serving as a frequent explainer of democracy's machinery in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and CNN. The doctrine her cases helped preserve in 2023 has since been narrowed, changing the ground rules of Section 2 enforcement. Lakin has responded with new legal theories and evidentiary records, pursuing remedies under those changing rules. The work, as she says, has only grown more urgent. She continues to seek relief that election officials can implement in time for voters to use it.