Marc Elias

Attorney Marc Elias works to preserve democracy through legal action and advocacy. Throughout his expansive career, he has taken on hundreds of cases involving election law and voting rights, including those that followed Donald Trump’s contestation of the outcome of the 2020 election—his team secured 64 victories in the post-election period alone. Elias has successfully argued and won four cases before the U.S. Supreme Court—with two more cases coming up this year—as well as dozens of cases in state supreme courts and U.S. courts of appeal. He has also successfully represented several House and Senate candidates in post-election litigation, recounts, and challenges. He is the founder of Democracy Docket, the leading progressive media platform dedicated to providing information, opinion, and analysis of the law and policy governing elections and voting rights.

About Democracy Docket Legal Fund

Democracy Docket Legal Fund supports pro-democracy, voting rights, and election litigation that protects the rights of all citizens to participate fully in our democratic process and safeguards our free and fair elections. This work has a particular focus on minority voters, first-time voters, and young voters.

Learn more about the Democracy Docket Legal Fund here.

When you look back in five years, what do you hope you and your organization have accomplished?

Everywhere we turn, democracy is under attack. Since 2020, we have seen the rise of election deniers, election vigilantism, and intimidation—even violence. We have also seen state legislatures and election officials curtail voting rights and undermine fair vote counting. Democracy Docket Legal Fund’s mission is to support litigation that will preserve democracy for the next generation. To be clear, over the long term, we are not going to solve the erosion of democracy in court. However, in the short term, courts are often the only check on those seeking to undermine free and fair elections and engage in voter suppression and election subversion. Ultimately, the solution to protecting democracy is to strengthen our collective commitment to democratic institutions and norms. DDLF will be successful if, five years from now, its litigation has halted the attack on free and fair elections and created space and time for civil society to strengthen, and for democracy to be preserved.

How is the changing climate impacting your work?

If you care about solving the problem of global climate change, then you must care about democracy. Only through free and fair elections will we have a government with the mandate and incentive to address this existential threat. Democratically elected leaders have led the way on addressing climate change, and without free and fair elections, the result will be authoritarian regimes that rarely, if ever, care about the crisis facing the planet.