On this week’s episode of Versus Trump, we have an interview about voting laws and litigation with former Hillary for America General Counsel and current voting rights superlawyer Marc Elias. As usual, you can listen online below, and subscribe here with any podcast player or here in iTunes.

For the last several decades, Marc has been among the most prominent election and political law lawyers for the Democrats. In addition to his work as the general counsel of John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and Hillary's 2016 campaign, he’s done work for the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and many individual politicians, and he’s also litigated a variety of political law cases all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Currently, he is the Firmwide Chair of the Political Law Practice at the law firm Perkins Coie.

Charlie sat down with Marc in Washington, D.C. for a wide-ranging coversation. First [at 2:00], they discuss what it's like to deal with litigation while on a political campaign or from within the government. They then move on [at 7:00] to a discussion of the big legal issues of the 2018 campaign season, including litigation over a variety of recent measures that have restricted voting in Republican-controlled states such as voter ID laws [15:00]. Marc and Charlie then [at 23:00] discuss the recent reversal of the federal government's legal position in a voting rights case from Ohio, and that leads into a discussion about the institutional role of the Office of the Solicitor General more broadly. The interview ends [at 30:00] with a discussion of modern redistricting and gerrymandering, and Marc discusses the various theories the Supreme Court might use to invalidate unconstitutionally gerrymandered maps.

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Links

• Marc mentioned a recent court decision forcing the State Department to turn over additional emails related to the Benghazi matter. A report on that decision is here, in Newsweek.
• Marc and Charlie discussed an Ohio case where the Trump Administration reversed the Obama Administration's position that Ohio's attempt to purge its voter rolls violated the National Voter Registration Act. The case is called Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, and an article about the switch is here in the New York Times. The Trump Administration's Supreme Court brief is here.
• Marc also discussed Gil v. Whitford, an upcoming Supreme Court case about partisan gerrymandering in Wisconsin. SCOTUSblog's case page for that case is here. Our prior Versus Trump episode on the case, called "Where There's a Gil...", is here.

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