With reports that voting rights are being compromised, some have concluded that elections are not truly democratic. Yet, individuals are making positive changes in their communities to protect these important rights.
Joshua Douglas joins Sam Wang to discuss his new book, “Vote for US: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting.” The book captures the positive stories of Americans working to secure elections by improving their local and state voting processes. In writing this book, Douglas aims to not only chart efforts to fight against voter suppression but also promote improvements that are making elections more inclusive, convenient, and democratic.
Douglas is the Thomas P. Lewis Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky. His research includes election law and voting rights, civil procedure, constitutional law, and judicial decision-making. He co-edited the book “Election Law Stories” and has published his work in top academic journals, including the Georgetown Law Journal, Penn Law Review Online, Vanderbilt Law Review, Washington University Law Review, among others.
ABOUT THE HOST
Wang is a professor at Princeton University, appointed in neuroscience with affiliate appointments in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Center for Information Technology Policy. An alumnus of Caltech, where he received a B.S. with honors in physics, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Stanford University School of Medicine. He conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University Medical Center and at Bell Labs Lucent Technologies. He has also worked on science and education policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. He is noted for his application of data analytics and poll aggregation to American politics. He is leading an effort at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to build a 50-state data resource for legislative-quality citizen redistricting. His work to define a state-level legal theory to limit partisan gerrymandering recently won Common Cause’s Gerrymandering Standard Writing Contest. His neuroscience research concerns how the brain learns from sensory experience in early life, adulthood and autism.