Speaker biographies

Doug Chapin is the director of Electionline.org, the nation’s only nonpartisan, non-advocacy website providing up-to-the-minute news and analysis on election reform. Electionline.org serves policymakers, officials, journalists, scholars, and concerned citizens by providing a centralized source of data and information in the face of decentralized reform efforts for everyone with an interest in the issue. Electionline.org also provides research on questions of interest to the election reform community and sponsors conferences where policymakers, journalists, and other interested parties can gather to share ideas, successes, and failures. Chapin is an attorney with an extensive background in election issues, including service as Democratic elections counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Rules and Administration.

Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.) is currently serving his seventh full term in the House of Representatives. He is the ranking Republican on the House Administration Committee, the committee to which most election reform legislation is referred. Many provisions from his proposed Voting Technology Standards Act were adopted in the 2002 Help America Vote Act. He is also a member of the Science and Technology Committee, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and the Education and Labor Committee. Ehlers was instrumental in the effort to connect the House of Representatives with the Internet and in the creation of the Library of Congress’ THOMAS website, which allows anyone to look up legislation being considered by Congress, laws that have been passed, and other information about Congress. Ehlers is the first research physicist to serve in Congress.

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 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.

Zachary Goldfarb is the national political researcher at the Washington Post, where he frequently contributes articles on a range of topics in American politics. In 2006, he contributed much of the paper’s coverage of election reform and election administration issues at the national level.

Rick Hasen is the William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. A nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, he is coauthor of a leading casebook on election law and co-editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed publication the Election Law Journal. He is the author of more than three dozen articles on election law issues. In 2002, Hasen was named one of the top twenty lawyers in California under the age of forty by the Los Angeles and San Francisco editions of Daily Journal, and was also named one of the top hundred lawyers in California in 2005. Hasen writes the widely read ElectionLaw blog. His most recent book, The Supreme Court and Election Law: Judging Equality from Baker v. Carr to Bush v. Gore, was published by the NYU Press in 2003.

Gracia Hillman has served as a commissioner on the Election Assistance Commission since December of 2003. Prior to her appointment and unanimous approval from the U.S. Senate, she served as executive director of the League of Women Voters of the United States, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation. She also held positions as executive consultant to the Council on Foundations and coordinator of the Voter Law Policy Project for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Throughout the 1980s, Ms. Hillman championed nonpartisan and bipartisan efforts to ensure open access to the voting process for all citizens and the continued voting rights of minority Americans, including work on the historic twenty-five-year extension of the National Voting Rights Act.

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, 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 about politics and governance. Most recently, he has published, along with Norman J. Ornstein, 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. 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. He is a member of the boards of directors of the Public Broadcasting Service and the Campaign Legal Center, and is 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 most recent book is The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America (Oxford University Press, 2006), coauthored with Thomas E. Mann.

Todd Rokita is the secretary of state of Indiana. As Indiana’s chief election official, Secretary Rokita continues to work on reforming Indiana’s election practices to ensure fair, accurate, and accessible elections. Rokita was elected by his peers nationally to serve on the nine-member executive board of the federal Election Assistance Commission’s Standards Board. The commission is charged by law to address election reform issues on a nationwide basis. Secretary Rokita has spoken on Indiana’s model election reforms from coast to coast and has testified before the United States Congress. He has also spoken to elected officials from across the country at the Helping America Vote Summit on Election Reform in San Diego, and before local election administrators in other states. Secretary Rokita has served as chair of the National Association of Secretaries of State’s New Millennium Young Voters Summit of 2004, chair of the standing Voter Participation Committee, and vice chair of the Securities Regulation Committee.

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