Episode 206: The Off-Season Work
There are a lot of things happening during the times that an election is not happening. Why should we care? Because these are the things we should know and engage around before we get to election time. Two court cases- Moore v. Harper which has implications for elections and Justin v. Tingling, around who sits on a jury- are important issues L. Joy is discussing with Ari Savitzky and Perry Grossman.
Homework:
Check out your Secretary of State’s or Board of Elections website to see what voter turnout was like in your State so you can strategize on how to engage folks eligible to vote but not voting BEFORE election season.
Read the ACLU’s article explaining Moore v. Harper https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/explaining-moore-v-harper-the-supreme-court-case-that-could-upend-democracy
Read the NYCLU’s case Justin v. Tingling https://www.nyclu.org/en/cases/justin-v-tingling#:~:text=Tingling,-Facebook&text=The%20New%20York%20Civil%20Liberties,convictions%20from%20serving%20on%20juries.
Our Guests:
Ari Savitzky is a Senior Staff Attorney in the ACLU Voting Rights Project.
Before joining the ACLU, Ari was an Assistant Solicitor General for the State of New York. Before that, he practiced at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where he was a Counsel in the firm’s Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation group. Ari also served as a judicial law clerk to Hon. Raymond J. Lohier, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Hon. John G. Koeltl of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Ari has argued over a dozen appeals in state and federal appellate courts and filed over twenty briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court on a wide range of constitutional and statutory matters, including challenges to partisan and racial gerrymandering. Ari’s significant past representations include a number of challenges to Trump Administration policies, as in New York v. ICE, City of Chicago v. Barr, and Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin v. Azar. Ari also helped successfully defend the constitutionality of Arizona’s independent redistricting commission before the U.S Supreme Court in Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission v. Arizona State Legislature.
Ari received his J.D. magna cum laude from NYU School of Law, where he was an editor for the NYU Law Review. Prior to law school, he worked for the democracy reform organization FairVote. He holds an AB in History from Brown University.
Perry Grossman is a Supervising Attorney whose work focuses primarily on litigation and advocacy efforts concerning voting rights and election law issues.
At the NYCLU, Perry’s cases have included New York Immigration Coalition v. U.S. Department of Commerce and New York Immigration Coalition v. Trump, the successful challenges to the Trump Administration’s efforts to put a citizenship question on the 2020 Census and to exclude undocumented immigrants from Congressional apportionment, respectively; NAACP v. East Ramapo Central School District, a successful racial vote dilution case brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act; Hotze v. Hollins, a successful intervention to prevent the disenfranchisement of 127,000 voters in Harris County, Texas who cast their ballots using drive-thru voting in the 2020 election; and successful cases protecting equitable access to early voting for voters in Rockland and Rensselaer Counties.
Perry was also counsel of record for the ACLU on amicus briefs in Gill v. Whitford, a partisan gerrymandering case and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a Second Amendment challenge to New York’s regulations on carrying concealed handguns. Perry regularly testifies before state and local legislative bodies concerning voting rights and election administration. He also teaches a seminar on voting rights as an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School and is is an occasional contributor to Slate on legal issues.
Perry is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Swarthmore College. He was a law clerk for the Hon. Barry G. Silverman of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
