Speaker biographies

Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, has worked on both the legal and policy aspects of elections for more than fifteen years. Mr. Chapin’s campaign experience, as well as his experience at the Federal Election Commission and Election Data Services, Inc., equipped him with a background in election issues including redistricting, election administration, the census, and campaign finance. Before becoming electionline.org’s first director, he worked at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, counseling clients on compliance with federal, state, and local laws regulating campaign finance, lobbying, gifts to public officials, and conflicts of interest. From 1997 to 2000, he served as elections counsel to the Democrats on the U.S. Senate Rules Committee, where he worked on election issues within the committee’s jurisdiction, including the disputed 1996 Senate election in Louisiana. At Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin & Oshinsky LLP, Mr. Chapin established the firm’s disclosure program under the Lobbying Disclosure Act and litigated redistricting cases in both state and federal courts.

John C. Fortier is a research fellow at AEI. He is senior counselor to the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and executive director of the Continuity of Government Commission, and was previously project manager of the Transition to Governing Project. He is a political scientist who has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Delaware, Boston College, and Harvard University. He is the author of numerous scholarly and popular articles and was the editor of the third edition of After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College (AEI Press, 2004). He coauthored “Presidential Succession and Presidential Leaders” in Catholic University Law Review (Fall 2004) and “President Bush: Legislative Strategist” in The Bush Presidency (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). He is a frequent radio and television commentator on the presidency, Congress, and elections. Dr. Fortier recently published Absentee Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils (AEI Press, 2006).

John Fund writes the weekly “On the Trail” column for OpinionJournal.com. He is author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter, 2004).
Mr. Fund joined the Wall Street Journal in April 1984 as deputy editorial features editor. He became an editorial page writer specializing in politics and government in October 1986 and was a member of the Journal’s editorial board from 1995 through 2001. Mr. Fund worked as a research analyst for the California State Legislature in Sacramento before beginning his journalism career in 1982 as a reporter for syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. In 1993, he received the Warren Brookes Award for journalistic excellence from the American Legislative Exchange Council. He and former representative of Pennsylvania James K. Coyne are coauthors of the book Cleaning House: America’s Campaign for Term Limits (Regnery Gateway, 1992).

Thomas E. Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. Between 1987 and 1999, he was director of governmental studies at Brookings. Before that, Mr. Mann was executive director of the American Political Science Association. He has taught at Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, and American University; conducted polls for Congressional candidates; worked as a consultant to IBM and the Public Broadcasting Service; chaired the Board of Overseers of the National Election Studies; and served as an expert witness in the constitutional defense of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. He lectures frequently in the United States and abroad on American politics and public policy and is also a regular contributor to newspapers and television and radio programs on politics and governance. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a recipient of the American Political Science Association’s Frank J. Goodnow and Charles E. Merriam Awards. Mr. Mann is currently working on projects dealing with redistricting, election reform, and party polarization. He and Norman J. Ornstein recently published The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI. In addition to serving as an election analyst for CBS News, he writes a weekly column called “Congress Inside Out” for Roll Call newspaper. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and other major publications. He appears regularly on television programs including The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, and Charlie Rose. He serves as senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission, and is co-director of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project, a collaborative effort to improve federal election administration with regard to the Help America Vote Act. In addition to his work on election administration reform, his campaign finance working group of scholars and practitioners helped shape the major law known as McCain/Feingold, which reformed the campaign financing system. Legal Times referred to him as “a principal drafter of the law,” and his role in its design and enactment was profiled in the February 2004 issue of Washington Lawyer. He co-directed a multiyear effort called the Transition to Governing Project to create a better climate for governing in the era of the permanent campaign, and is currently co-directing a project on election reform. He is a member of the boards of directors of the Public Broadcasting Service and the Campaign Legal Center, and a member of the board of trustees of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. His many books include The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America, coauthored by Thomas E. Mann.

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